The Unmovable Moral Bedrock That Other Moral Positions Rest On And The Difference

I'D INTENDED to get right back to Louis Boudin's Government by Judiciary this morning but that will have to wait, perhaps as long as a week, I may be out for several days, maybe longer, a health issue has sprung up and it may either be relatively minor or major, we'll see.

I would highly recommend that if you have access to the two volumes of his study, it is more relevant today with the out of control, Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court about to send us back to the very period which Boudin knew if not something far worse and, as it is clear, the Constitution not only doesn't have any controls on the out of control, unelected, lifetime appointed tyrants in black robes, there is no legal mechanism for even forcing them to not be openly dishonest crooks and nest featherers.   We do something to change that on the most basic levels or things are going to go entirely to hell.

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It was the farthest thing from my mind to write something so internal to the Catholic Church this morning but this passage from the National Catholic Reporter by the very erudite Michael Winters touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately, the modernist trap of moral relativism that might be more dangerous than the other traps of convention and orthodoxy that it was invented to counter.  The issue, a letter written by some of the worst Catholic hierarchs complaining about the German Conference of Bishops, most of those named by Winters are men I have little to no respect for and several who I rather despise but he concentrated on one of the signatories to the thing that he has some respect for but who I know nothing at all about:

At the meetings of German Catholics earlier this year, the synodal body publicly voted for a document calling for women deacons and for involving laypeople in the selection of bishops, as well as calling for a relaxation of the rule of celibacy for the clergy and for some kind of blessing of same-sex unions. Previously, the bishops of Scandinavia voiced concerns about "the direction, the methodology and the substance" of the German consultations as did the president of the Polish bishops' conference.

Last year, when some of the preparatory documents for the German meetings were released, Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila issued a 15-page criticism. He was one of the signatories of the current letter as well. And most of the other signatories are not surprising: Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco; two retired archbishops, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz; and various other prelates. Several of the names coincided with the lists of bishops who voiced support for disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign. That was a much graver issue than this letter to the German bishops.

One name on the list of signatories jumped out at me: Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana, who was at the meeting of bishops and theologians in Chicago last month, and whom I always think of as a pastor first and foremost, without any special ideological baggage.

I wrote to Warfel and asked why he signed it. "As I've read about the Synodal Path and the Fundamental document produced from it, concerns surfaced," he replied in an email. "From what I have read, there is an indication of a desire to change Church discipline and doctrine. While there are ample disciplines that may be adjusted, e.g., mandatory celibacy, doctrine is a different matter, especially when the delegates of the Synodal Path indicate irreformable doctrine."

Warfel said he was worried about the German process sowing confusion. "There is one statement in particular that caught my attention and caused a bit of heartache: '…there is no one truth of the religious, moral and political world…' This comes from the Fundamental Text document. To me, it sounds a lot like, 'Well, that may be your truth, but it is not my truth.' This can easily lead into relativism."

As I said above, I have come to view moral relativism as an extremely dangerous thing, one of the things that is driving us into a plutonium dark age in which even the truth is held to be both meaningless and not worthy of any protection against the most degenerate and dangerous of lies - which might get me back to the Supreme Court and its decisions but I'll forego that for now - but, really?

The list given by Winters of signatories to the attack by North American, Australian and other bishops on those in Germany is telling; Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz, who Winters notes were "vocal in their support of disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign." 

A number of those men openly supported Republican-fascism and Donald Trump, the flower of modern moral relativism - a better name for which would be the denial of the existence or importance of morality, even as they wanted to use a pantomime of morality as a political, social and economic tool against other People.   There has been no act of moral relativism of more serious consequence than such putative religious figures supporting the amoral degeneracy of Trumpism.   And there is no Archbishop living today who is more of an embodiment of relativistic moral degeneracy of that kind than Carlo Maria Viganò,  his ersatz moralistic and superstitious politicization of Putin's invasion of Ukraine in his war against Western politicians, especially the second and, I assert, most Catholic president in American history, President Biden, have been so extreme that even many on the Catholic far-right have broken with him.  

The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops has more than enough to reform about its own moral relativism, in full operation right now and for all of its history.   They could start with practicing truth and real honesty.   I suspect that, Winters' respect for him aside, Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana is barking up the wrong tree in going after the German bishops.  It doesn't say just which issues the German bishops have spoken on that got his back up but I suspect it is the typical ones for U. S. bishops, communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, the ordination of Women, LGBTQ rights - especially LGBTQ rights and marriage equality - which he sees as unacceptable moral relativistic change.  Until JPII made his dodgy declaration that the issue of Women's ordination was a closed one, I suspect he may have not included that one on such a list - the issue of such declaration by even a pope who got himself canonized but not in the formula of so-called infallible teaching reminds me of nothing so much as the hijinks of the U. S. Supreme Court.  Usurped powers are seldom usurped for doing the good.

I think it's notable that there is a moral issue, a moral absolute that is behind those contentious items in the conservative bishops' agenda that is as basic to the entire monotheistic tradition that Catholicism is a part of and that is equal justice under God, not under artificial, humanly created "law".  The rights of Women, of LGBTQ People to live their lives, exercising their own ownership of their bodies, their own right to act in full moral and political equality and under the same commandments of justice and love and to follow any calling they perceive to ordination or marriage as anyone else is an unmovable rock.   

I can't speak for Women but I can speak out of the experience of being a gay man.  It is as possible for consenting, adult, gay men to use sex and sexuality as morally or as immorally as anyone else.  I have, repeatedly argued against the irresponsible practice of many gay men in promiscuity, sexual acts which have a high risk of spreading disease and causing harm, of using sex to encourage and practice inequality, sexual practices based on abuse and pain, promoting feelings of superiority and inferiority, sex which was not an aspect of faithful, committed love and the practice of treating other people with love, both in a committed relationship and as a part of the wider society.   I have condemned writers who discourage that as they promote the immoral and, perhaps worse, amoral use of sex in selfish and transactional terms, denying the ability of, gay men, especially, to form honestly faithful and committed marriages.  

Children cannot give real consent to sex.  Their sexual abusers have no legitimate right to the support of anyone, LGBTQ or straight.

Certainly the priest-sexual abuse scandals prove that the Catholic Church hierarchy, in reality, with the full knowledge of those up to and including Popes, has contained the reality of widespread sexual immorality among the all-male priesthood.   We now know that there was widespread criminality as well as merely knowing retention of criminal child rapists within the active priesthood, assigned by bishops and Archbishops to rape again in new assignments sometimes without even other priests being informed, certainly none of the parishioners were.  We can be quite certain of that, it is impossible to imagine, even in the pre-Vatican II period that the laity would have put up with a known child rapist acting as a priest, probably not even in a parish far distant from them.   

NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY DENY IT, THAT IS SOMETHING WHICH CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE VICISSITUDES OF A "CELIBATE" ALL-MALE PRIESTHOOD and the shrinking numbers of those willing to take up that profession.   Those Catholics who have pointed to other denominations with married clergy who have also sinned as a defense of the unmarried, all-male priesthood can't change the fact that every aspect of the Roman Catholic priest-sexual abuse scandals is intimately related to the rule of all-male "celibacy" for its clergy.   And, I would say, it's what you can expect of ANY institution when it's dominated by an all-male, exclusive power holders with an interest in keeping things as they are.

And we know from the released, often pried loose, documents concerning the scandal that that situation was no secret among the hierarchy.  In the article linked to it says:

Asked if sending such a public rebuke really fit the definition of synodality, Warfel replied, "I actually view the open letter more as frank dialogue. Pope Francis has emphasized the need of dialogue." He added, "I think a confidential or private letter would not garner much attention from the German bishops. I also do not believe a confidential of private letter would remain so for very long. As [former Vatican nuncio] Archbishop [Pietro] Sambi said to me long ago, before I was appointed to Great Falls-Billings and had heard about the appointment before he called me, 'It's hard to keep a secret in the Church.' "

They were certainly able to keep some secrets from the wider public, if they were secrets they really didn't want to get out.  They also know how to leak as well as any other holders of power do. 

That is something which all of these orthodoxy-supporting hierarchs, those who have acted with moral responsibility as well as those who should have been indicted and convicted of aiding and abetting child rape choose to be a part of, even now.   There is no group in the Catholic Church which has earned the distrust of the public more than those who hold the most power in it.  The all-church Syodality effort by Pope Francis is, I am certain, his attempt to broaden the power base, opening it up to the laity, Women too.  Which is one of the real reasons that a lot of the bishops have opposed, thwarted and monkey wrenched it.  The letter which is discussed in the article looks like part of that reactionary effort, to me.

It would seem that the German Bishops are among those who have heard and taken the wider voice of The People of the Church into consideration, which accounts for why their agenda might seem terrifying to the conservatives among the Bishops.  

The U. S. Bishops, like the members of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court can choose to ignore even the most vital issues for people they lord it over but who they aren't directly concerned with.  American "democracy" full of anti-democratic features is truly bizarre and increasingly unworkable.  In the Senate, that makes them value the anti-democratic atrocity of Senate Rules more than they do democracy, what leads the Supreme Court to its even less democratic and anti-democratic holdings and why so many of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are so entirely out of touch with the lives of Catholics, especially when those Catholics want the bedrock of justice within the very real reality of their own lives.   An Archbishop, even one who might have the respect of Michael Sean Winters might understand the problem of seeming moral relativism but he misses that what seems relativistic to him is actually resting on that bedrock of justice and respect for individuals and their real lives, something that even those who wrote the scriptures might not have understood in their world in their times and customs but which the ongoing Creation has revealed to us, today.   Maybe you have to be a LGBTQ member to sense the moral bedrock that should govern your actions while someone outside of it only sees what shocks and scares them.  Enough gay men seem to be unseeing about that, but you can say that about any group.  Straight men aren't universally aware of it either.

Easter - We Live In A More Complex Reality Than Fits The Rules Those Rules Don't Produce The Common Good

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

1 Corinthians 15:1-8  NRSV 

THE EARLIEST information we have about Jesus being raised from the dead is in the letters of Paul which, clearly, also indicate that Paul taught the earliest Christian converts he convinced those things before he felt it necessary to repeat that in letters to them.   And he indicates that he was also taught that, almost certainly when he met with Cephas (Peter) and James, almost certainly the brother of Jesus and to other people he knew and, by his testimony, through his own encounter with Jesus raised from the dead.  No doubt Peter and James and the others who had known Jesus before his execution taught him many other things that he didn't otherwise know.   

It's not out of the question that the earliest witnesses to the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene, the other Marys mentioned in the Gospels, Salome, Joanna, etc.  might have talked about that with Paul but he doesn't say, maybe he didn't trust the women's testimony or maybe he figured he shouldn't bother to mention them because the people he wrote to wouldn't figure that their testimony was trustworthy.  

Just what the Resurrection that is mentioned means is a mystery.   The accounts of even Paul with the risen Jesus are clearly not like you'd encounter someone else, it's in this world but not described as being like something you'd expect in this world.  If that makes it more or less believable to anyone is as it is but one thing it means is that, as described, naturalistic, materialist-scientistic deductions won't dismiss it on any other than a choice to not believe what's said.  The ol' Second Law of Thermodynamics ploy that I got pulled on me when I said that - probably most of those pulling it couldn't tell you why they might believe that would apply - doesn't suffice to answer the claims. 

You're free not to believe it, if you pressed me on exactly what it means I will freely tell you I can't tell you because I don't know.  Catholics are, maybe, more comfortable with admitting that there is a lot about life which is mysterious at its least mysterious and this is something that is entirely mysterious, not even the skeptics agree on the basic terms of what's being argued.  I don't think naturalistic arguments are all that good at really explaining much of anything, not even the observable motions of the simplest and most safely generalized movements of physical objects - even the definition of what physical objects are is problematic when you try to get to absolute knowledge, not to mention their actions and what causes those actions.

We live in a more complex reality than fits the rules the mockers want to insist we play by.  And even they don't want to play by those rules, themselves as they pretend they do.  

"Liberal Christians" is a term that has about as much use as "conservative Christians," which is not much.  You have to define your terms.  Which "liberals" and which "conservatives" do you mean?    As in political ideology, the problem with "liberal" is whether you mean those who try to approximate the radical justice economics of the Sinai tradition of the Prophets or the even more radical economics of love to the point of abandon and trust that Jesus taught or do you mean the materialist "liberalism" of 18th century and later scientism?   I believe in the earlier form of liberalism, I am entirely skeptical about the second one.  Science should be a. kept within what its methods can legitimately tell you about, b. always be admitted to, by design, exclude morality and its consequences and so is useless to do what you must accept moral laws in order to achieve, a good and decent life on the basis of equality and common good.  Science might get you some products but it will never produce the common good.  

Abandon and trust out of love, what Jesus taught was not easy to take, it certainly isn't for the affluent, not even in the relative affluence of the American middle-class.   It's what got him killed, it's the motive behind 18th century "liberal" rejection of religion, the wealthy didn't want to get nagged about having to give away their hoarded wealth in church.  That's also what's behind the pseudo-Christian heresy of the prosperity-gospel which is one of the most dangerous lies you can hear from pseudo-Christians from FOX and the Republican-fascist party, the worldly clerics of the Catholic Church to Putin and the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow as he follows the Czarist trappings of state nationalism which are rampant there. 

Do you have to believe in the Resurrection to have that?  I don't know, it sometimes seems that those who profess that belief less are better at putting some of that into practice.  You have to believe the teaching authority that asserts that pretty strongly to put it into practice and it's clear even those who proclaim the Resurrection the loudest don't believe it enough to even try. I doubt that we're going to see the billionaire and millionaire backers of pseudo-Christianity sell all they have, give the money to the poor and take up their cross.  If there's one thing you can say about the alleged religion of such "christians" on the basis of authoritative definition, it is "by their fruits you will know them."  The man they claim to believe is God gave that rule, though they have no intention to live by it.

Do I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?  Do I believe in the theology of that developed by Paul, especially in Romans, and the other writers of the New Testament and the earliest Christian theologians that Jesus is the first and we will follow to eternal life?   I certainly hope it's true, especially if the universalists are right that all will be saved.  I reject it's known to not be true or possibly true as those under the influence of the musty, cobweb encrusted positivism will insist,  and reject as an irrational insistence that any questioning of their framing is "meaningless."  That's a trick no one should fall for because it's just bullying, not a matter of logical consistency or necessity. 

Rather than belief, I can give a definite answer that I have a hope that it's true because the possibility of that looks like a way of life and not a way of death.   I hope that hope is enough, if it isn't I hope for definite belief.  If you want to reject that as a choice and not an argument, everything anyone is ever going to have on this - short of an experience like Mary Magdalene's or Peter's James', etc, or Paul's - is a matter of choice because there is nothing else to put that off on to.