Pope Francis on Education

While living  in Argentina then Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka engaged in religious dialogue with one another. Their conversations on many current issues are recorded in a very relevant book, on Heaven and Earth. In these remarks on Education,  Pope Francis was speaking mainly from his experience of how schooling took place in Argentina. but it is fascinating to see how pertinent his remarks are when applied to schooling and education in the United States.

Bergoglio: In the Bible, God shows himself as an educator: "I carried you over my shoulders, I taught you how to walk", he says. The obligation of the believer is to raise their young. each man and each woman has the right to educate their children in religious values. The effect of the State in taking away this right can lead to cases like Nazism, in which the children were indoctrinated with values different from those of their parents. Totalitarians tend to add water to their own mill.

Bergoglio: Schools educate toward the transcendent, just like religion. Not opening the doors to a religious worldview in the academic environment cripples the harmonious development of children, because this concerns their identity, the transmission of the same values their parents have, which are projected onto the child. They are deprived of a cultural and religious inheritance. If in education you take away  the tradition of the parents, only ideology remains.  Life is seen with biased eyes, there is no unbiased hermeneutic even in education. Words are full of history, of experiences of life. When someone leaves a void, it is filled with different ideas from the family tradition; that is how ideologies are born...

 Bergoglio: There is a difference between a professor and a teacher. The professor presents his material in a detached manner, while the teacher involves others; it is profoundly testimonial. There is also a coherence between his conduct and his life. He is not merely a transmitter of science, as is a professor. We need to help men and women to become teachers, so that  they can be witnesses; that is essential to education.

on Heaven and Earth, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka  pp.128 - 132

Pope Benedict on Homosexuality: Part One

       The book Light of the World consists of a series of broad ranging conversations between  Pope Benedict XVI  and Peter Seewald. It's about various controversial issues affecting Church and World. In Chapter 14, titled "Overdue Reforms ?", Seewald  quotes two statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding homosexuality, and then asks Pope Benedict if these two views in the Catechism are not contradictory. 

      Here is Seewald's first quotation:...the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible...They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives.  The Catechism calls us to treat homosexuals with the respect and acceptance that is their due, simply because they (and we) are human beings. Then comes the second statement: Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as great depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.  Here the Catechism clearly says that homosexuality is not a "natural" or "normal" way for human beings to act, and in fact is a disorder, so much of a disorder ("intrinsically") that there is no way to justify homosexual acts or make them right. So Seewald asks: "Doesn't the second statement somewhat contradict the respect for homosexuals expressed in the first one"?

         Seewald seems to be asking how can you accept and respect a person (first quotation) if you think what he/she is doing is wrong, sinful, seriously disordered, and  in fact, a great depravity (second quotation). Worth asking, no? When I find a person's actions to be deeply repugnant,  my feeling of repugnance usually extends itself automatically to the person as well.  Seewald's question, however, is not  phrased in a way that is emotionally charged. He keeps the question theoretical: "Is not one perspective incompatible with the other? Here's Pope Benedict's answer to that question: "No." Well, that is both clear and blunt; no hedging or qualifying, just a straight out negative. He goes on to explain: "It is one thing to say that they are human beings with their problems and their joys, that as human beings they deserve respect, even though they have this inclination, and must not be discriminated against because of it. Respect for man is absolutely fundamental and decisive."

             I love that explanation. We human beings are concrete, specific individuals, not theoretical constructs, and the pope recognizes that fact.  He tells us that every human being deserves to be accepted and respected simply because he/she is, i.e. exists! The pope offers more than a theoretical answer, because both acceptance and respect involve our real feelings and actual emotions towards concrete people. He is pointing out that our value as  humans doesn't begin with our activity or productivity, but springs simply from being. We have no right to reject or despise any member of the human race since our very existence is good. That makes sense to me. A newborn baby doesn't just need love,  it has a right to love, and a right to demand it. What's the basis of that right? The newborn's very existence. If my, or our, worth depended on actual accomplishments, very few of us would be worth anything at all. An embryo, a fetus, an unborn baby, even a new-born,  would be worth nothing. Acceptance of  and respect for one another on the very basis of our common existence, is the decisive starting point for all of our interactions with one another. 

        The pope continues his train of thought: "At the same time though, sexuality has an intrinsic meaning and direction, which is not homosexual." This is the affirmative thrust his"No" leads to. Sexuality has a positive meaning and direction which we do not arbitrarily assign but has been built into the structure of sexuality. That is his second point, which he builds on the foundation block of his first statement. The reason why he can disagree with, and disapprove of, homosexual activity even though he has a very real acceptance of, and respect for, homosexuals as human beings is congruent with the meaning and direction he sees in sexuality. In fact, it is out of respect and acceptance for homosexuals that the pope affirms an obvious truth and says that homosexuality is a disorder. Since homosexuality is itself disordered,  both  the acceptance of, and respect for, anyone who calls himself homosexual require that this truth be made clear. Indeed, why would you lie to someone you accept and respect, no matter what the disorder? Presumably, the more serious the disorder, the greater the need to face the truth instead of colluding with an illusion or a deception. 

        Since the fall into original sin,  our human nature itself is in a state of disorder. The disorder in us begins when we do. The Creator made us male and female, as the Scriptures say. (True, God made us without any disorder originally, but a look in the mirror, and a look around us at the world we live in, both  provide objective proof that Adam and Eve have passed on to us the skewed human nature they acquired by sinning. This is not surprising, for how could they pass on anything else?)   Men are disordered, women are disordered, and so are our male-female relationships.  As individuals and as couples, we will never be  a complete whole, because both our individual wholeness, and the wholeness that comes from our  male/female relationships, does not start off in right relation to God. We carry that disorder into all we do, and all we develop into,  as we journey through life. 

 

    Our basic disorder cannot be overcome by our own efforts. Because of the Fall, we have no way to stand outside ourselves and evaluate ourselves objectively. The righting of our relation to God occurs by his grace and mercy working in us. But God does not work in us without us, i.e. without our asking him to, and asking freely and profoundly. This asking is not merely a matter of choosing Option A instead of equally valid Option B, but desperate begging. Our asking is "de profundis", a need born of the misery we find ourselves in. Only the Creator who mercifully sustains us even as he lets us experience our interior disorder can put us in right relation to himself. 

   

     Why not simply view homosexuality as one more disorder among the countless others, and let it go at that? Because sexuality is foundational. Sexuality affects the very ground of our being. Our sexuality with its male-female components, constitutes the core of who we are. Certainly  many disorders abound in us, and they are all interrelated,  but since our core being is disordered, so are our perceptions of our selves, and our perceptions of our relationships. Our disordered core-being is male/female, masculine and feminine, two halves of the whole each of us is,  even though one half predominates.   I am not equally half man and half woman, but a male with both masculine and feminine qualities, or a female with both masculine and feminine qualities. How the two halves become more or less integrated, or  or become more out of balance,  in any person male or female, is and remains mystery. 

      To call this process mysterious is not an attempt to escape its complexity, but to respect it. Science should study the phenomenon of attraction and sexual identity, and discover all it can about it: same sex attraction, other sex attraction, or attraction to both sexes. No matter how thoroughly science explores all the other related causes of homosexuality, I do not believe it will never be able to find one that is primary. Science will, I believe, learn more and more about the specific causes it studies. But the danger, I believe, in learning more and more about specific causes is that we also move further and further away from ever getting around to see how all the causes interrelate. The presence or absence of a certain gene, the help or harm from mother or father during early in childhood, or is the result of the psychic wound because of abuse,  the predisposition we have in us because of our genetic structure, the influence of our formation and schooling, society and culture,  etc., can all be studied ad nauseam.  An either-or explanation will never be sufficient, and no amount of studies will ever be complete or definitive. Even if all finite factors could be exhaustively studied and comprehensively understood,  science has no instruments to measure free will and grace. Both are impenetrable to the scientific eye. This does not prevent science from striving to learn all it can about the causes it can measure, but  should serve to increase science's appreciation of the mystery we are.

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        Our Creator is a Father who loves us even when he does not approve of us.   So acceptance of others by us never means denial of any disorder, nor does it presume any who accept us think we are free from disorder!  Nor does acceptance mean approval of the activity that a disorder  provokes. Disorders are counter-productive, and end up being harmful to the self as well as to others. Acceptance and respect should be the starting point from which the person with any disorder is to be related to and dealt with, by family, friends and neighbors, doctors and lawyers, social workers and therapists, prison guards and or parole officers, etc. But the strange thing in our society and elsewhere is that homosexuality is no longer recognized as a disorder. Why is that? Why is gayness is mainstreamed, normalized, and legalized as an alternative life-style? I suppose one reason is that,  over time, we can be brainwashed and socially conditioned to see the abnormal as normal. Bombardment through the media, training in the schools, political lobbying, legislation, and cultural pressure has succeeded in making commonplace what was startlingly odd in society not so long ago.

       But Pope Benedict has not lost track of the true nature of sexuality He, Benedict, continues: "We could say, if we wanted to put it like this, that evolution has brought forth sexuality for the purpose of reproducing the species." By appealing to Evolution, which science sees as free from the taint of Religion,  he is able to point out what science has loss sight of, or refuses to respect: namely that sexuality is geared by its nature to reproduction. Any honest scientist who deals with plants,animals, humans, or genes and cell structure would have to agree with that observation.  Even an atheist who was a scientist has to admit this. Only then does he introduces Religion: "The same thing is true from a theological point of view as well. The meaning and direction of sexuality is to bring about the union of man and woman and in this way, to give humanity posterity, children, a future. This is the determination internal to the determination of sexuality. Everything else is against sexuality's intrinsic meaning and direction. This is a point we need to hold firm, even if it is not pleasing to our age."  Posterity, children, and future generations: it is so obvious that these are intrinsic to the meaning and direction  of sexuality, that it should not even have to be stated. How would our ancestors of long ago ever have gotten beyond  mere rutting, if that was all nature had designed them to do?  

Carron: Faith and Hope in Christ

                                         In His Name We Find Hope

 If the judgment called faith dominates life, you see it in the fact that this being seized is what comes forth in the way we face all the circumstances of life; it comes forth by default, as they say, as when one, no matter what experience she has, no matter what happens to her, is invaded by the memory of something she cares about, a presence she cares about. So then, you see that the relationship with this presence dominates because it reappears with evidence in every experience; I do not invent it when I need it. I do not create it when faced with the dramatic circumstances of living. It comes to mind, imposes itself on me, in front of all the circumstances, be they beautiful or ugly. At times they are more meaningful when they are beautiful because they are less at risk of "being invented"; when they are ugly, since there has to be some meaning, one can run the risk of inventing a meaning. When life is full, this risk lessens: that acknowledgement imposes itself and that memory arises, because I cannot watch the sunset, or an evening together, without the emergence of that urgent need, the strong pressure to say his name.

Fr. Julian Carron, Magnificat magazine,  July 2013, p. 284

Barron: The Christ Event

The title of Fr. Robert Barron's book 

                                                     b r i d g i n g 

                                             THE GREAT DIVIDE 

graphically states his aim.  The blurb on the cover explains what the book is meant to be: 

    MUSINGS OF A POST-LIBERAL, POST CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL CATHOLIC

The divide is the abyss that today's Catholics experience, an abyss that separates them from others in their own Church,  from Christians of other denominations, from modernity, and the world in general. Central to bridging the divide is Christ himself, and  Fr. Barron uses St. Thomas Aquinas to help us bring Christ's importance into proper focus. 

Here are two quotations that grabbed my mind and won't let go:

".....It is in light of the event of the Incarnation that Thomas interprets both God and the human, seeing the former as an uncanny, surprising, ever greater act of love, at the latter as, at its best, an act of sheer openness to the inrushing of God. To put it succinctly, he sees in Christ, the meeting of two ecstasies, and this coming-together is the lens through which he reads everything else...."p.88

"....the radically unworldly character of God's being is paradoxically enough revealed precisely in the act by which God enters the world. Were God a being in or alongside of the universe, one of the natures in the world, God could not become a creature without ceasing to be God or compromising the ontological integrity of the creature he becomes. In short, that God is totaliter aliter (totally other), and semper maior (always greater), that he is alluring yet totally ungraspable mystery, is given to us in the event of Christ....."p. 92

I don't know if Fr. Barron had read Giussani before writing this book, but the two men are on the same page, and speak the same language. Neither one reduces Christ to an abstraction, a theological or philosophical system, a rightest or leftist movement, a political stance, an ideology, or a sectarian doctrine. What makes me love them both is the awe they stand in before the Christ Event and the reverence with which they contemplate its implications.

Wit and Wisdom of Flannery O'Connor

For the fun of it, I began rereading "Mystery and Manners", by Flannery O'Connor, a book mostly about writing which is made up of different conferences, lectures and essays she wrote for different occasions, and which were collected and published by her estate after her death. I had read it back in the 1970's and underlined some statements she made because they jumped off the page at me at the time. They still do. Here are some of her observations for your enjoyment.

.....I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to a writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually it frees the story-teller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing by guaranteeing his respect for mystery....

.....Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause....

{To write}...is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character....

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.....

...To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to realty....

....Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning but for the fiction writer himself, the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction....

....There may never be anything new to say, but there is always anew way to say it...

....People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything because they lack the courage....

....I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or of the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth...

....St.Thomas called art 'reason in making'. This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, it is because reason has lost ground among us...

....nothing produces silence like experience...

...I have found, in short, from reading my own writing that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil, I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil...

Speyer: The Church

".....The Church does not function, after all, in the manner of a sieve,  which would sift the good from the bad, would effect a strict selection; but more like a melting pot into which everything is thrown together and makes an effort to live from God's grace. The Church is vested with grace. She lives from the grace of the living Lord, but no less from the grace of the Father, who gives her his sanction, and the grace of the Spirit, who blows through her. She is the locus of an encounter with eternity, indeed,  quite actually the locus of the beginning of life, the beginning of eternity in the midst of time. Man is drawn into this origin, shaken to the core in it and converted, enriched, and at the same time made poorer. Within it he gauges constantly anew what the Lord is, what distance separates him from sinners; he comes to feel his own powerlessness, sees also the consummate powerlessness of the Lord, which is the source of all grace, and understands that there can be no comparison between the two. And yet he knows that his existence in the Church is nothing but grace and love, and that even the feeling of his powerlessness is an instance of the Lord's grace, a gift in view of his poverty, and a sign by which the Father recognizes him."

The Countenance of the Father, Adrienne von Speyr, p.103 Ignatius Press

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