Year of St Joseph: Remptoris Custos!

How fitting in this year dedicated to St Joseph in the Universal Church, that the work of Karol Jozef Wojtyla should have a prominent place as well:

Of note, especially, is paragraph# 6 which highlights Joseph as guardian of the Incarnate Word, and  somehow of the Redemption:

Joseph's way of faith moved in the same direction: it was totally determined by the same mystery, of which he, together with Mary, had been the first guardian. The Incarnation and Redemption constitute an organic and indissoluble unity

St John Paul II goes on to emphasize in this vein, the significance of Joseph being added to the Roman Canon by Pope St John XXIII:

 Precisely because of this unity, Pope John XXIII, who had a great devotion to St. Joseph, directed that Joseph's name be inserted in the Roman Canon of the Mass-which is the perpetual memorial of redemption - after the name of Mary and before the apostles, popes and martyrs.

For nearly 2,000 years, St Joseph was not even mentioned in the official prayers of the Church.  Yet now, the "protodulia" or piety always owed to him only behind that of Mary's "hyperdulia" is fully realized in the Liturgy of the Mass.

Ephesians 5:21 [Mulieris Dignitatem, Patristic Scholars & NFP]

I am particularly grateful to the Van Schaijik family of The Personalist Project in Pennsylvania for initially bringing to my attention the topic of Mutual Subordination.  While we may not see eye-to-eye on everything, I have come to appreciate their explanation of the Church's teaching on this matter.  Indeed, it has become a central dynamic in my view of marriage along the lines of St John Paul II's work in #24 of "Mulieris Dignitatem".  Dr John Grabowski has written extensively on the topic, especially as it relates to the development of the Church's understanding of Matrimony between two equal, complementary, and distinct persons (man & woman).

In 2016, an essay entitled, "The Patristic Origin of 'Mutual Subordination'" was published at the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology from the perspective of a divergent view on the more high-profile topic of Mutual Subordination.  While the authors were willing to compromise with a potential for "mutual service", the divergence stemmed largely from an insistence on asymmetrical and non-reciprocal (one-way) marriage dynamics.  While I can agree with an asymmetrical perspective to a degree based on the philosophical explanation of Angelo Cardinal Scola's Nuptial Mystery, I cannot dismiss the call for reciprocity (two-way) in the relationship between husband and wife.  Our own local Bishop has been very clear on the need for reciprocity based on St John Paul II's teaching as well (min. 18ff).

A logical illustration of the two perspectives can be formulated as follows:

Non-reciprocal (One-Way)
If asymmetrical & non-reciprocal
Then one-way relationship w/ wife's submission to head

Reciprocal (Two-Way)
If asymmetrical & reciprocal
Then two-way relationship w/ mutual submission

The most common argument against the latter is that the two-way dynamic is not practical in application.  On the contrary, Dr Grabowski illustrates how practical a dynamic it can be when Natural Family Planning (NFP) is involved!  After all, it is not the choice of any one individual to cooperate in pro-creation.  As the saying goes, "it takes two to tango".

Sr Prudence Allen makes some crucial distinctions worth noting in her paper "Mulieris Dignitatem Twenty Years Later":

• egalitarian complementarity--a distortion which emphasizes too much sameness between men and women
• hierarchical complementarity--a distortion which emphasizes male authority to the detriment of female equality
• Ontological complementarity--the proposal of St. John Paul II for how best to approach understanding human dignity embedded in Mulieris Dignitatem

Lastly, it is important to recall the often neglected Person in the mutual submission verse as written in St Paul's Letter to the Ephesians 5:21, "Be subordinate to one another, out of reverence for Christ".  As Archbishop Sheen explains in his Three to get Married, there is a Third-party involved in the Sacrament of Matrimony.  In the end, He is the head of the Christian family that accepts His reign. 

Theology of Risk

Primarily drawing from the work of Mother Angelica and Blessed John Henry Newman, the development of a “Theology of Risk” (as identified by Mother Angelica herself) has garnered an increasingly high profile since the passing of the great founder of EWTN1 . Likewise, Newman’s broad- reaching verbiage concerning risk runs along the lines of a business venture in what he calls “Making a Venture of Faith” 2 . The consensus between the two proposes that modern man has lost a sense of the value of what Christ offers in reconciling him to the Father, so much so that man is unwilling, or oblivious to, the call of God to risk his life and livelihood for the Gospel just as Christ did for his sake.

On the other hand, magnanimous men and women (like Mother Angelica) have taken enormous risks as acts of faith in the providence of God. As a result of this Imitatio Christi, they may very well have bridged the chasm between the “rich man” and Abraham’s bosom. In contrast, there are more than enough examples of rich young (and old) men who walk away from such a challenge in sorrow: Charles Dickens’ tale about Ebenezer Scrooge is one such example that could have ended similarly to more and more cases of modern men of the world. In general, men have lost a sense of what it means to risk for the Gospel. Particularly those men whose job it is in the business world to minimize risk, be adverse to risk, or to only risk what is nearly guaranteed to make a return based on a cost/benefit analysis. These parameters could be applied to the Gospel, as in the parable of the talents and the building of the tower, etc. Yet, worldly men who might even darken the door of a parish each week, do not desire to “make a venture” for eternal life. Instead, they experience peer pressure to store up treasures for the moth to destroy; they go the way of mammon in the hopes that insurance, stocks and bonds, etc. will pass on their legacy to the next generation without pause. To be clear, these prospects are not evil unless the “love of money” for its own sake is involved.

Pope Leo XIII and St John Paul II stressed the great good and potential that work, capitalism, and private property engender in the economy 3 . Simultaneously, their treatment of legal immigration and mission speaks to the need for mobility as well as stability, the willingness to “move” mountains if necessary by faith so as to make a claim in the reality of the Resurrection. Without such a claim, there is little proof in the relationship between a man and the “father of faith”, Abraham. Abraham, who himself was as well as his son Isaac, were successful businessmen throughout their long lives: risked his home, his only son of the promise, his herds and crops by tithing to Melchezidek, and so on. Chief of these risks, of course, is Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in the belief that “God could raise him from the dead” 4 .

In Isaac, as a type of Christ, Abraham had a sense of being a type of the heavenly Father (Imitatio Patri) by not withholding his beloved son. He underwent a Kenosis, that is, a self-emptying with tremendous risk for his livelihood. As a result, it is Abraham who welcomes the downtrodden Lazarus beyond the grave. It is Abraham, and not the rich man—famous for making corporal demands of Lazarus only when it was too late--, whom we call, “father of faith”. His lofty title is as a result of “becoming obedient unto death”, an extraordinary paradox in which Abraham is both a type of Christ and a type of His Father (Imitatio Christi et Patri). After all, Abraham was “as good as dead”, meaning essentially that he had hit rock bottom. Nevertheless, God made him the “father of many nations” with “descendants as numerous as the stars and sands of the seashore”.

What assurance did Abraham have of the fulfillment of this promise? He was eventually given the son of the promise, and even then, Abraham was willing to risk losing him out of obedience. Had Abraham not engaged in a “Theology of Risk”, his story would be that of the “rich old man”. He would have walked away to Ur of the Chaldeans “sad for he had many possessions”. This is the plight of many men today, young or old, unwilling to take on the adventure of being a father of faith and risk losing their lives for the Gospel. Perhaps an Ebenezer Scrooge moment may still loom on the horizon for them while they passively sleep and dream, but making that presumption after many missed opportunities may undermine the prospect of taking an active risk for the greater glory of God today.

___________________________
1 Mother Angelica. Arroyo, 151-153
2 “Sermon 20”. Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman
3 Rerum Novarum * Centessimus Annus
4 Heb 11:19

JPII & Paul Ricoeur vs Masters of Suspicion

With news of scandal plaguing the Church’s every level in current events; an understandable reaction could continue to gain considerable traction, namely Donatism.

This is a heresy that raged in the time of St. Augustine, when Emperor Constantine reinstated former apostates (Traditors) to the episcopacy, etc. 1 The Donatists held firm to the belief that not only these reinstated Church leaders, but all clergy who were potentially in mortal sin could not administer valid Sacraments.

Under St. John Paul II, extreme situations arose with a range of men like Archbishop Lefebvre to Marcial Maciel. Some deem Lefebvre as saintly in his rejection of the Second Vatican Council, and most rightly deem Maciel as a scoundrel. In either case, there is room to question the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church, and to even reject certain aspects or persons in authority as a result of mistrust. An outright rejection such as with Archbishop Lefebvre’s unlawful ordination of SSPX bishops in 1988, could easily be judged by objective behavior as Donatism, especially since the original Donatists were named after a bishop who was also consecrated out of rivalry against the Traditors 2 .

In the Theology of the Body, I believe that St. John Paul II addressed Donatism under a different guise, and he identified it as the “hermeneutic of suspicion” after philosopher Paul Ricoeur. 3 JPII pointed out three men in particular who propagated this way of approaching the world as Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. 4 In our day, this constant suspicion has run rampant in the Church, even to the point of certain scholars accusing the Pope of heresy without substantial proof or outright defiance on his part. I am not proposing that a healthy skepticism is out of the question, rather, I am pointing out the similarity between Donatism and even Manicheanism and being a “Master of Suspicion”.

 The opposite of suspicion, according to St. John Paul II, is the “Ethos of Redemption”. This is a trust in the Redeemer of man who has the power to dynamically transform the sinful human condition into that which is even able to overcome concupiscence. 5 While I am not excusing abuse in any way, I do find abundant consolation in the “Ethos of Redemption” because it Christologically orients my gaze away from the fallen world to the Redeemer.

 It may be said that naïveté may have caused St. John Paul II to elevate men like Theodore McCarrick or Marcial Maciel to positions of authority in the Church. More importantly, it was his confrontation with a suspicion propagated by the Communist innovator Marx and others that helped him to see men as innocent until proven guilty. In Communist Poland, so many false accusations against priests could easily have brought one to the same suspicious attitude that pervades today. Instead, JPII stood fast against it while also administering justice as seen in the case of Archbishop Lefebvre.

_________________________

1 Cantor, Norman F (1995), The Civilization of the Middle Ages. P. 51
2 Ibid.
3 Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 13
4 St. John Paul II, Theology of the Body 46:6-
5 Ibid.

JPII Locates "Patron of Europe": St. Benedict of Nursia

T.S. Eliot lhad the European Continent in mind when he composed “The Wasteland”.  Georg Ratzinger[1] was present and on-site when the oldest monastery in the world, Monte Cassino, was destroyed by American artillery in World War II.  Much of the visible roots of Christian Europe were literally ‘uprooted’ by open warfare in the 20^th century, including July 11^th’s Saint’s final resting place, as I said regarding Monte Cassino.  Thankfully, new monastic life is taking root at the very site of Benedict of Nursia’s original monastery despite a few natural disasters[2].  As Patron of Europe, St. Benedict’s intercession is not limited to the post-war “Wasteland”, but can truly help to rejuvenate a “new springtime” in more ways than one (Lectio Divina, Ora et Labora, etc.)

St. John Paul II located Blessed Paul VI’s Apostolic Letter Pacis Nuntius of 1964 as the first time that St. Benedict was named “Patron of Europe”.  It’s no small title as JPII linked the Saint with the likes of Cyril and Methodius, the former of whom still has owns the secular right of claiming the Russian language under his namesake, Cyrilic.  Wojtyla writes:

The ever-living relevance of the eminent figures of Benedict, Cyril and Methodius, as concrete models and spiritual aids for the Christians of today, and especially for the nations of the continent of Europe, which, especially through the prayers and work of these saints, have long been consciously and originally rooted in the Church and in Christian tradition[3].    

These three saints launched never before seen waves of culture that still inspire hope and consolation in the midst of the “Wasteland”.  After all, once the Roman Empire fell, the dark ages posed a similar threat to today’s paganism and degeneration.  I’m reminded actually of the present day situation in inner city Detroit, a veritable “wasteland” that has hints a tremendous spiritual renewal with the latest “Unleash the Gospel” from Archbishop Vigneron[4]! 

Furthermore, St. Benedict’s legacy contributed immensely to Christian culture in the USA as well!  Abbot Boniface Wimmer brought the Benedictine Rule to Pennsylvania in the 19^th century and founded the Archabbey of St. Vincent[5] where I have visited multiple times and learned Lectio Divina.  There are also Benedictine Universities across the country, some in need of renewal (especially in Minnesota) and some in excellent standing, like Wimmer’s own St. Vincent’s!

There is still much to be accomplished through the living and prophetic intercession of St. Benedict of Nursia all over the world.  St. John Paul II did well to emphasize patron of Europe in the letter of Paul VI, and Pope Emeritus Benedict was on the mark by choosing Benedict as his namesake.  Despite the wasteland, there is over generations of faithful in the land a guarantee of a new springtime in Europe.  

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[1] http://www.ignatius.com/promotions/my-brother-the-pope/the-book.htm

[2] http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/03/10/echoes-of-st-benedict-as-norcia-monks-rebuild-after-earthquake/

[3] http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_19850602_slavorum-apostoli.html

[4] http://www.unleashthegospel.org/

[5] http://amcass.org/

Wojtyla's Confirmation and Cardinal Sapieha

The response of Karol Wojtyla to a challenge from Adam Cardinal Sapieha is what every hard-working DRE would hope for from the youth:


Cardinal Sapieha played a key role in Karol Wojtyła’s vocation. In 1938, he went to the town of Wadowice for confirmation. Among those confirmed was Wojtyła. Sapieha asked him what his plans for the future were. When he learned that he planned on studying Polish literature in Krakow, Sapieha lamented that he didn’t choose the seminary instead. During the war, Wojtyła studied in Sapieha’s illegal seminary. After the war, the future pope – smitten with the writings of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila – asked him if he could leave the diocesan seminary and become a Carmelite monk. Sapieha denied the request, instructing him to instead finish what he had started. (Many believe that Sapieha was in part motivated by the fact that Poland, whose clergy was murdered on a massive scale in concentration camps, desperately needed new diocesan priests.)


I recall teaching Confirmation classes in Detroit and praying for responses like Wojtyla's.  More often than not, however, the students wanted to be confirmed simply for the Quinceañera which was promised them by their padres...After that celebration though, what next?  Hopefully both men and women would desire Carmel like Wojtyla!

Wojtyla's Comradeship + Friendship

 

Love and Responsibility goes into great depth about the difference between Comradeship and Friendship; so much so, that I think Comradeship deserves its own formula as does Karol Wojtyla[1]!  He emphasizes the objective qualifiers[2] in Comradeship as prerequisites for friendship.  In other words, somewhat like sympathy, comradeship is a great aid to friendship.  I would attempt to formulate it like this, with explanation to follow:

ᵾ Work or ᵾ Company + ᴲ individual’s role at work or company → ᵾ public ᴲ identity with both ᴲ role & ᵾ Company  

Wojtyla’s argument for the value in comradery is that it fosters community; it essentially brings the existential into the universal.  While not sacramental, like a marriage involving the friendship between a man and a woman, comradeship does allow for a kind of stewardship of family in the broader environment of neighborhood and city, etc.  Simply put, it brings people together for a common purpose akin to solidarity.

In other sections of Love and Responsibility, he calls the process of fostering community “integrating”[3] the exclusive love between man and woman into the broader network of relationships.  He even warns that if a couple fails to integrate; their own relationship may not succeed.  In terms of comradery then, it can determine the success or failure of a friendship.

Seen side by side, the two formulas (friendship and comradeship) look like this.  *Please note, sympathy as defined by Wojtyla simply means "shared life together":

 ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -( ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy) = Friendship

ᵾ Work or ᵾ Company + ᴲ individual’s role at work or company → ᵾ public ᴲ identity with both ᴲ role & ᵾ Company = Comradeship

Integrated together, I would say they look like this (where “Comradeship” respresents its own formula in the form of just the single word) :

ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -( Comradeship ᵾ, ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy) = Friendship

I added “Comradeship” to the “Conformity of Wills” section of the Friendship formula on account of it being integral to function of community.  Even St. Paul refers to the “proper functioning of each part” of the Body of Christ, and if certain parts compete or are envious of each other, then functioning is disintegrated. 

  

        

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[1] Wojtyla, Karol.  Love and Responsibility.  “From Sympathy to Friendship”. P. 94  Ignatius: San Francisco, 1993

[2] Ibid

[3] Wojtyla, Karol.  Love and Responsibility.  “The Problem of Integrating Love”. P. 114-118  Ignatius: San Francisco, 1993

 

________________________________________________________

Fr. John Nepil has a thorough article on the quality of certain friendships: pleasant or true, according to Aristotle and the process of either making beer or scotch.  I found it interesting in that the chief distinguisher between a true friendship and a pleasant one is reconciliation.  In other words, true friendship—like the intense process of making scotch (chemical change and transformation after distilling) —requires painful and transforming demands of forgiveness and reconciliation.  His approach adds wholly new (ᴲ) existential and (ᵾ) universal qualifiers to my formula for friendship derived from Karol Wojtyla:

ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -(ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy)

 

 

1994, St. Dominic of Silos' Chant and JPII

It is hard to believe that in 1994 when the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos released an album of Gregorian chant, my little league baseball coach played it for us.  He was a former bull-pen catcher for the Boston Red Sox and truly reached heroic status for our team (hitting homers from both sides of the plate @ 350 yards!).  When he started playing chant though, we were a bit skeptical...until we started hearing it everywhere.  St. John Paul II had been Pope for nearly 16 years!

I still love this chant, and had memorized the whole album by the time I was 12.

St. Dominic de Silos, ora pro nobis! (memorial 12/20) 

Thatcher and JPII

Recorded history attests to a cross-continental alliance between Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.  After all, she celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall: but to her dismay, the Euro, the Maastricht treaty (EU) and political integration followed.  Recent events with Brexit, however, may prove to be her last laugh!

 

Margaret Thatcher was raised in the Methodist tradition in rural England.  John O’Sullivan calls her, “the incarnation of provincial Methodist virtues—a very simple person, not riven by doubt about essentials, and decisive for that reason.” (ibid)  She was decisive about a few principles that appear in the Pope’s Centesimus Annus: subsidiarity and moral free-market capitalism.  These two Catholic social teachings unconsciously informed her worldview, although she may have called them simply “Euro-skepticism”.  As I mentioned, the EU formed soon after Thatcher’s resignation, but her legacy continues even to the present day, as seen in the British patriotism of Daniel Hannan .   

But for a British Prime Minister to align herself with the Bishop of Rome in the Cold War is truly an irony of history as well.  Certainly Elizabeth the 1st would not have made such an alliance.  Yet, Thatcher and the Pope were not necessarily aligned afterward as best indicated by the dispute over the Falklands.  The Pope openly opposed her aggression in that regard.  For this and other reasons of sheer stubbornness, she was known as the “Iron Lady Thatcher”.

The "Banker" turned Undertaker St. Callistus

 

Along the lines of St. Matthew and T.S. Eliot, Today’s St. Callistus the 1^st was a repentant banker.  Early on in his life, he squandered the entrusted funds of widows in Rome. 

Sent to the mines to do hard labor, Callistus later encountered the mercy of Christ in his exile and was released on account of his own confession of faith.  As proof of his repentance, he took charge of a cemetery in Rome, which was posthumously named the Catacombs of St. Callistus. 

JPII says of the place:

«I am conscious of the important historical and spiritual significance of these monuments» John Paul II said in a recent address to the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. «By visiting these monuments, one comes into contact with the evocative traces of early Christianity, and one can, so to speak, tangibly sense the faith that motivated these ancient Christian communities... How can we fail to be moved by the humble but eloquent traces of these first witnesses to the faith?». Then considering the goals of the Year 2000, the Pope concluded: «Today attention is focused on the historic event of the Great Jubilee, when the Roman catacombs will again become a favourite place of prayer and pilgrimage... Together with the great Roman basilicas, the catacombs should be a necessary destination for the Holy Year pilgrims».[1]       

From squandering money at the bank for widows to his conversion as an undertaker, St. Callistus could have been remembered merely for the events of his early life.  But he actually was elected Pope in the 3^rd Century AD!  Then he was martyred in Rome, not far from where he had been a banker years before.

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[1] http://www.vatican.va//jubilee_2000/magazine/documents/ju_mag_01091997_p-70_en.html#top

Santa Maria

 

Coming from Columbus, Ohio I have always admired Christopher Columbus.  There is a beautiful replica of his flagship, Santa Maria, in my hometown and I have boarded it many times for tours, etc.  The Knights of Columbus are named after the Explorer of course and JPII was a staunch advocate of theirs, including in his native Poland.

Rather than try to defend Columbus or the Knights, who are easily defended in the faith, I was impressed a few years ago to see Apocalypto.  This is the story of a native of the new world who was captured and nearly subjected to human sacrifice.  He then escaped, and after finding his family well, views in the distant a ship much like the Santa Maria. 

The question is, were the natives of the New World better off without the Conquistadors like Columbus?  Were they better off with human sacrifice and slavery by dominant tribes?

T.S. Eliot, St. Matthew, and JPII

On Eliot's Friends
___________________________________________

The Ex-patriot poet Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank in London from 1917-1925[1].   Upon leaving, he published his more famous Waste Land, but I have come to thoroughly enjoy his Choruses from the Rock.  Especially on this feast of St. Matthew, who was himself called from “el banco” to follow the Word Incarnate, I find Eliot’s story fascinating.   He says in the Rock:

We will build with new timbers/ Where the Word is unspoken[…]/ When the Stranger says: “what is the meaning of this city?/ Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”/ What will you answer? “We all dwell together/ To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?/ Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger./  Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

St. Matthew rose and followed “the Stranger/ the Word”.  Eliot did the same, though in sickness, heartache and feeble attempts at marriage and family life.  He may have known well the words of Jesus: “Those who are well need not the Physician, but the sick do” as his health deteriorated after the death of his father:

Yet the years of Eliot's literary maturation were accompanied by increasing family worries. Eliot's father died in January 1919, producing a paroxysm of guilt in the son who had hoped he would have time to heal the bad feelings caused by his marriage and emigration. At the same time Vivien's emotional and physical health deteriorated, and the financial and emotional strain of her condition took its toll. After an extended visit in the summer of 1921 from his mother and sister Marion, Eliot suffered a nervous collapse and, on his physician's advice, took a three month's rest cure, first on the coast at Margate and then at a sanitarium Russell's friend Lady Ottoline Morell recommended at Lausanne, Switzerland[…] Whether because of the breakdown or the long needed rest it imposed, Eliot broke through a severe writer's block and completed a long poem he had been working on since 1919. Assembled out of dramatic vignettes based on Eliot's London life, The Waste Land's extraordinary intensity stems from a sudden fusing of diverse materials into a rhythmic whole of great skill and daring.[2]

Only after he passed through the Waste Land (1922) did he stumble upon the Rock (1934).  His wife loved his tenure at Lloyd’s, as it was conducive to family life and stability.  He himself spoke highly of it at times, despite pressure from his communist peers to abandon it (esp. Ezra Pound) [2b].  Unlike other radical poets of those days, Eliot had the combination of business and art at his disposal.  However, the time came in what appeared to be a prolonged conversion for Eliot (not to communism!), immediately following his sickness:

A lucky chance allowed him to escape from the demands of his job at the bank. Geoffrey Faber, of the new publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), saw the advantages of Eliot's dual expertise in business and letters and recruited him as literary editor. At about the same time, Eliot reached out for religious support. Having long found his family's Unitarianism unsatisfying, he turned to the Anglican church. The seeds of his future faith can be found in The Hollow Men, though the poem was read as a sequel to The Waste Land's philosophical despair when it appeared in Poems 1909-1925 (1925). In June 1927 few followers were prepared for Eliot's baptism into the Church of England. And so, within five years of his avant-garde success, Eliot provoked a second storm. The furor grew in November 1927 when Eliot took British citizenship, and again in 1928 when he collected a group of politically conservative essays under the title of For Lancelot Andrewes, prefacing them with a declaration that he considered himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."[3]

He followed the Word from despair to hope.

Not long after the Rock, Eliot also published a Catholic play based on the life of St. Thomas Becket.  Murder in the Cathedral marked the proof of a profound change of his worldview.  It’s no wonder that these later works of his are not recognized in the secular canon.  But in the life of the Church, they are small memorable and instrumental steps in re-uniting the Anglican to the Catholic Church.  St. John Paul II said of St Thomas Becket:

In making my pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyr, Saint Thomas Becket, I sought to play a part in healing the terrible wounds inflicted on the Body of Christ in the sixteenth century. We prayed together there, Your Grace and I, for that wholeness, that fullness of life in Christ which is God’s gift of unity[…] My pilgrimage to Canterbury was motivated by obedience to the will of Christ our Lord who, on the night before he died prayed “that they all may be one”. Today the divisions among Christians require that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome should also be a primacy in action and initiative in favour of that unity for which Christ so earnestly prayed. I see our celebration of Evening Prayer together as a further moment in that ecumenical pilgrimage that Catholics and Anglicans, together with other Christians, are called to make. Our goal is to discover once more that common inheritance of faith which was shared before the tragic sequence of events which divided Christian Europe four centuries ago.[4]

And again, Eliot and JPII intersect in the person of Emmanuel Mounier whom Eliot featured in his 1937 edition of his periodical The Criterion.  Eliot's French Catholic friend, Montgomery Belgion, introduced Eliot to Mounier:

By the January 1937 number of The Criterion (XVI, 63), a very incisive analysis of the fast-shrinking economic middle way is given once again by Montgomery Belgion in the “French Chronicle.” After observing that “To-day the French Right is as revolutionary as the Left,” Belgion points to a corrective third path, to be found in the work of Emmanuel Mounier. [2c]

And the footnote given for the above quote goes on to say:

In “The Need for Economic Personalism” can be found the major influence that Mounier’s work had on Karol Wojtyla’s development of the tenets that would become personalism: ‘Wojtyla and his Polish colleagues read Mounier with intense interest. In Mounier, they found the first philosophical account of the human intellect and intersubjectivity’ [2d]

I also recommend Wyoming Catholic College’s study of Eliot’s life in the light of Christian hope:

In my own life, I remember being at the bank in Westerville, OH when once a week I began to go to Mass at Mt. Carmel-St. Anne's Hospital.  There, I heard the call of the Divine Physician to fatherhood, and within the next nine months my first son was born at that same Hospital.  I was so familiar with the place, that the doctors thought I was on staff there! 

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[1] http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/Our-Group/our-heritage/2015-our-milestone-year/250-years-of-lloyds-bank/did-you-know/

[2] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm

[2b]

http://www.marketsandmorality.com/index.php/mandm/article/view/629 [2c] ibid [2d] ibid

[3] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm

[4] http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1989/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19890930_xxvi-domenica-per-annum.html

Friendship, Chaput and JPII

/

Update 12/28/16:



It’s been a long while since I took a course in symbolic logic, but I have thoroughly appreciated the method ever since 2005.  It’s an excellent reminder that communicating can be as simple as an equation, whether using a validly deductive method or a validly inductive method. 

Here’s a stab at an ongoing approach to friendship that I put together from Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility:

ᴲ Sympathy→ ᴲ Conformity of Wills ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy)

 

The key to interpreting the above is as follows:

ᴲ=Existential/Particular

ᵾ=Universal/Absolute

 

In summary, the ᴲ’s and ᵾ’s serve as ends in themselves for the qualifiers (means) expressed in concepts like “trust”, etc.  After all, no one would argue that “Trust” is an end, but is rather an aid toward friendship of persons.

 

Overall, it’s easy to see how particular friendship is with 7 out of 9 ends being ᴲ.  The few absolutes may need some explanation then, seeing as how they could easily be argued as either/or.  When I assign ᵾ to “conformity of wills”, I am referring to what is ideally being conformed to, namely, God’s laws/the natural law in terms of chastity, well informed conscience, etc.  Likewise, when I assign ᵾ to hope, I am referring to the end of hope which is the Lord Himself.
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Update 9/5/16:
A few great points by Chaput, differentiating between loyalty and fidelity,

"The root of loyalty is the French word loi (law).  The root of fidelity is the Latin word fides (trust).  Loyalty is ordered to duty and fidelity is ordered to love.  And real love, as every mature adult knows, is both beautiful and demanding." (213).

I find this striking insofar as cuts to the quick of much of Jesus' own critique of his contemporaries.  It also speaks of St. Faustina's image: Jezu ufam tobie.  Loyalty can be done for all the wrong reasons, as in adhering to the illogical conclusions of Roe v. Wade in America.  Fidelity, on the other hand, clings to the trustworthiness of a Person, the Son of God.

This makes all the difference in the world for Wojtyla's approach as well; since without trust, there is no sympathy down the road, and vice versa:
Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills (Trust & Sympathy) → Virtue of Hope (Trust & Sympathy)
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A few lessons I've learned from the Capuchin Archbishop Chaput after reading his Render Unto Caesar:

Evangelization should accompany friendship

• If it does not then the friendship is not genuine (190)
• The reason being that Christ himself is the 1st love and Cause of friendship
• An aspect of missionary activity should also be involved (193)

His main premise is that "the Gospel spreads by personal contact and friendship" (190).  It is hard to argue against this, seeing as how many saints were close friends: Ignatius and Xavier, Francis and Claire, to name a few.

But what exactly mission would have to do with a potentially insular relationship like friendship would be a harder sell.  For this reason, immediately following his statement on friendship, Chaput references JPII's Centesimus Annus:

We need to root the social dimension of our Catholic faith, and everything else we do, in God's love, which is the fuel for our mission of evangelization.  Pope John Paul II reminded us that Catholic social doctrine, at its root, is missionary.  It is 'an instrument of evangelization'. (193)

When I speak of friendship on this level of evangelization I am often met with a major misunderstanding and offense.  "You mean friends aren't those I choose to 'just get along' with?" and, "there needs to be some kind of agenda when it comes to spending time with my friends?"

My answer, for theirs and for one's own sake, is "that's correct, friendship is for evangelization and mission too".
 

Wojtyla y Amistades

Differing definitions of friendship: “people who hang out together”, “people who just get along”, “share each other’s interests”, etc.  Rather than friendship, I would classify these explanations under what Karol Wojtyla called in Love and Responsibility: “sympathy”[1].  Sympathy certainly has a place in many relationships, but it is not true friendship.

Wojtyla draws his definition of friendship unmistakably from St. Thomas Aquinas[2]. While sympathy plays an initial and later supplemental role in fostering friendship, it is ultimately the will according to Wojtyla and Aquinas which sustains friendship.  Even more specifically, the will as gifted with hope in turn provides for true friendship.  Placed in sequence then, ideal friendship between persons runs this course:

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills → Virtue of Hope   

Far too often today, “friendship” remains on the sentimental and sympathetic level.  And unfortunately, Wojtyla indicates in romantic relationships especially, “As soon as sympathy breaks down they often feel that love too has come to an end”[3].  Yet, the other danger, in which Wojtyla seems to differ from Aquinas, is that when friendship grows cold it must be supplemented by sympathy[4].  As in the case with marriage, a “union of wills” does not necessarily provide for a successfully long-term relationship.  Likewise, Daniel Schwartz notes about Aquinas’ view of friendship that the virtue of hope must be active in addition to “conformity of wills”[5].      

The necessity of sympathy is a given as it fosters many relationships anyway, strictly based on “subjective intensity”[6] of encounter with another.  Hope, on the other hand, does not reveal itself as necessary until the temptation towards distrust begins to creep into relationships.  That is to say,

uncertainty about what a friend or potential friend wants and desires can be an obstacle to friendship. And the same goes for certain sorts of uncertainty about what a friend will want and desire in the future. In chapter five Schwartz discusses, first, Aquinas's view that we should presume good of others, unless there be evidence to the contrary, and hence that we should presume that people mean what they say, other things being equal and unless there be evidence to the contrary. (Schwartz calls this a ‘presumption of authenticity’.) Second, Schwartz tries to show how hope, for Aquinas, can be an aid to friendship, by being a cause of friendship, by sustaining friendship, and by warding off the ‘destructive social impact of despair’.[7]

So again, Wojtyla appears to differ from Aquinas in this respect by supplying sympathy as a ‘cause’ of friendship while Aquinas supplies ‘hope’.  But as I have indicated elsewhere, St. Thomas Aquinas does not exclude emotions from the dynamism of love as many suppose he does!  Rather, Aquinas’ proposal of hope as crucial to sustaining friendship includes the emotions and sympathy just as Wojtyla would not exclude the virtue of hope either.  The following sequence continues to apply to both Wojtyla and Aquinas’ view, though I would note a supplement of sympathy moreso in Wojtyla’s approach:

 Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills (& Sympathy) → Virtue of Hope (& Sympathy)

This sequence would readily agree with Pope Francis’ more recent insistence on the necessity of tenderness in relationships, or more aptly named “mercy” which Aquinas deemed as God’s most potent attribute! 

 

[1] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility.  “From Sympathy to Friendship” 88-94ff Ignatius: San Francisco, 1981.

[2] Aquinas’ own definition surprisingly differed from Aristotle’s: Justice was essential to Aquinas’ view of friendship whereas to Aristotle, ‘when men are friends they have no need of justice’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1155a 26).

[3] Ibid, 90.  See also Wojtyla’s ‘Libidinistic’ Interpretation (61).

[4] Ibid, 91.  See also Wojtyla’s ‘Rigorist’ Interpretation (57).  Pope Francis has also termed sympathy as ‘tenderness’.

[5] Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship, Oxford University Press, 2007, 189pp.,

[6] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility.  “From Sympathy to Friendship” 90

[7] Michael Rota, University of St. Thomas reviews: Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship, Oxford University Press, 2007, 189pp.

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Although originally 2 different posts I have combined these under common theme


A group of friends drawn initially together by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, included: Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Hedwig Martius, and Roman Ingarden. There were many more great minds in the following of Husserl (including Heidegger and Von Hildebrand) but I find the relationships of these four significant on the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross because of the effect that they had on the person of Edith Stein and her legacy.

Max Scheler, for his part, is credited by lecturer Benjamin Gibbs as having empowered Stein “to take religious ideas and attitudes seriously for the first time since her adolescence”[1] In Stein's own words, Max Scheler had almost mythic status:

One’s first impression of Scheler was fascination. I have never encountered the phenomenon of genius so clearly in any other person. His large blue eyes seemed to radiate the light of amore exalted world. His features were handsome and noble; yet life had left some devastating traces in his face.[2]

It's interesting to note, that Husserl and Scheler authored philosophical works which provided an alternative to 'psychologism' or the scientific pretentions of psychology.[3] Since Freud's work would have been popularly widespread in their day, I can only guess as to why they would be formulating a much more sound phenomenology than the be-all/end-all discipline of psychoanalysis.  I have written elsewhere of Scheler’s refutation of psychology and was unaware that this was also one of Husserl’s tenants of Phenomenology.  Indeed, Gibbs notes that this point was one of the first things that drew Stein to Husserl.  Gibbs notes, “Edith studied psychology at Breslau University for four semesters. By then she had become discontented with psychology’s lack of a scientific basis”[4] What is meant by “science” here is simply an ordered, logical basis in accord with reality.  Something she found much more apparent in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.

Besides Scheler, Stein found lifelong friends in Hedwig Martius (later Conrad-Martius), Roman Ingarden and Adolf Reinach (and his wife Anne).  Though Hedwig decided to convert to Lutheranism, it was in her family library that Edith found the Life of St. Teresa of Avila.  Famously, though the exact details are lacking, Edith’s own words relate:

For twelve years Carmel had been my goal, since the summer of 1921 when the Life of our holy mother Teresa came into my hands and put an end to my long search for the true faith.[5]

Her friend Roman Ingarden, a Polish philosopher from Krakow, would later become a teacher of Karol Wojtyla.  The two friends corresponded about numerous topics, both philosophical and personal.  Gibbs notes that both Ingarden and another professor named Hans Lipps may have been romantic interests for Stein,

According to Hedwig Conrad-Martius – Edith’s philosophical colleague and friend Hans Lipps. But her love for him was not reciprocated; at least, it was evident that Lipps didn’t want to marry her. Another object of Edith’s affections may have been Roman Ingarden, to whom she wrote over 150 letters, mostly reporting the details of her work with Husserl. In one letter Edith addressed Ingarden as ‘Mein Liebling’ – ‘my dear’.  But he returned to Poland early in 1918 and married a school doctor the following year. Edith wrote congratulating him on his marriage, and asked him to burn any personal letters from her that he might have kept.[6]

Roman Ingarden would have been the teacher to relay Max Scheler to the young Karol Wojtyla in Poland.  Gibbs notes, “The future Pope wrote his Habilitationsschrift on the ethical theory of Max Scheler”.  Through Ingarden as well, Wojtyla must have been introduced to the person and though of Stein.  He too would later canonize her as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. 

It’s fascinating to trace how the friendships that arose from the initial followers of Husserl made a tremendous impact on history, even to the degree that Karol Wojtyla would adopt much of the thought of the Phenomenologists.  However, a sad note is the subsequent break of Husserl with his students as he distanced himself especially from Stein on account of her being an ambitious woman in a “male profession”.  His own thought became more and more disjointed, whereas his students carried the integrity of the Göttingen school far beyond his reach. 

Benjamin Gibbs study of Edith Steins life, to which I refer often here, does not claim to cover the entirety of her story and makes no mention of her sister Rose’s journey to Carmel with her.  What he intended to do was to collect previously untranslated German letters of Stein, as well as include her unfinished Autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, as major sources in the corpus of Stein’s life (because only the popular but imprecise memoir of Teresa Benedicta as written by Sr Teresia Renata Posselt was available as yet).  He does well to fill and blanks in her life, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the network of philosophers who influenced her ultimately toward Catholicism. 

A final note regarding Stein's "friendship" with Husserl.  It lacked "sympathy", even though Stein herself attempted to reconcile "empathy" with Husserl's discipline in her own painstaking work on the subject.  Their relationship only reflected the "conformity of wills" aspect of the following sequence (although the conformity of Husserl's will is questionable):

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills → Virtue of Hope  

Indeed she often refers to him as "the master", which unfortunately reveals a master/slave dynamic at work, especially since he would not allow her to become his peer professionally and kept her at the level of secretary.

On the other hand, her longstanding friendships e.g. Roman Ingarden did reflect this sequence:

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills (& Sympathy) → Virtue of Hope (& Sympathy),

and she found that they too disagreed with Husserl.  Her work with empathy turned out to be the last scholarly chance for Husserl to change his thinking, and unfortunately he did not.

 

 

[1] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. www.carmelite.org/documents/Heritage/gibbsconversionofstein.pdf, May 2012 p.12. It's important to note also that Gibbs mentions often how Stein was not an atheistic philosopher in principle, she merely 'stopped praying' at one point in her young life, and she did not begin again until interacting with brilliant philosophers in Gottingen, Germany.

[2] Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family, An Autobiography. translated by Josephine Koeppel, OCD. http://www.sistersofcarmel.com/edith-stein-life-in-a-jewish-family/ 1933­

[3] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. www.carmelite.org/documents/Heritage/gibbsconversionofstein.pdf, May 2012 p.7. “For Edith, the attractive features of Husserl’s phenomenology were:(1) Husserl’s repudiation of the scientific pretensions of psychology, and of ‘psychologism’ -

the error of conflating the formal sciences of logic and pure mathematics with the empiricalmethods of psychology.”  Psychologism is essentially the belief that psychology can explain all phenomena.

 

[4] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. P.6  Edith herself says, All my study of psychology had persuaded me that this science [phenomenology] was in its infancy; it still lacked clear basic concepts; furthermore, there was no one who could establish such an essential foundation. On the other hand, what I had learned about phenomenology so far fascinated me tremendously, because it consisted precisely of such a labour of clarification and because, here, one forged one’s own mental tools for the task at hand. (LJF 222)

[5] in die Hände gefallen war’. The translation in Posselt (2005) renders the German incorrectly as ‘had happened to fall into my hands’, thus appearing to support Posselt’s claim that Edith came across the book by chance. (ESGA I, 350; cf. Posselt 118).

[6] Gibbs: Letter of 1948 to Fr John Oesterreicher, in Never Forget, ed. W. Herbstrith (ICS 1998), 266.
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Final Installment: 12/29/16

Wojtyla and Tymieniecka’s friendship

I was unaware of a 30+ year relationship between Karol Wojtyla and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: a student of Roman Ingarden, a first-hand Polish follower of Husserl as I expressed in my post, “Wojtyla y Amistades”.  She is the founder and former president of the World Phenomenology Institute , and a translator of Wojtyla’s own Acting Person.  Her entrepreneurial spirit garnered the support of not only her former teacher, Roman Ingarden, but also a crucial contributor to the Theology of the Body: Paul Ricoeur.

The Institute’s founding president and principal intellectual guide for more than three decades was the European philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a student of Roman Ingarden and close associate of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur.  Ingarden, Levinas, and Ricoeur joined together with other well-known philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Stephan Strasser in supporting and advancing the Institute’s programs and publications during its early years and ever after.  It is but one measure of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s personal accomplishment that she was  able to attract and engage the very best philosophical minds of our time in the Institute’s programs and publications, in large part as a direct consequence of her own reputation and philosophical achievements.

Tymieniecka was married to Hendrik Houthakker, an economics professor in the United States, and together the couple hosted Wojtyla in 1978.  She became good friends with the Pope in 1973, while he was Cardinal of Krakow, and they remained “pen-pals” of sorts until his death in 2005.  She passed away in 2014, leaving the World Phenomenology Institute in the hands of:

Dr. William S. Smith, Executive President, and to Co-Presidents, Dr. Jadwiga S. Smith and Dr. Daniela Verducci.  These three have been involved with the Institute for nearly thirty years, and Dr. Tymieniecka entrusted the future of her life-long work to these three individuals.  Dr. Jadwiga Smith will organize conferences and programs on the American front, while Dr. Verducci will continue her excellent work in Europe and beyond.  Together these three talented organizers and scholars will continue the work of the WPI.   They very much look forward to working with a newly constituted Editorial Board of peer reviewers, who will continue the high-quality  of scholarship for the WPI’s three major publication, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas and Trends, and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue.