Love Among the Ruins

Earth's returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!

Love is best.

--Robert Browning , Love Among the Ruins

I started a page called On the Christifideles and the Media.     It has a link to the English text of Pope Pius XII's address to Catholic journalists.  The principles outlined in the resources are useful for not-especially trained laymen speaking up in their community, but also, I think are useful for Catholics reading or listening to opinion.     At least, I think they are useful reminders for myself.

I also started an Amoris Laetitia timeline page.    This is a paradigm "Catholic genre" debate.     As well as the first level topics of marriage and the Eucharist, there are implicit presuppositions that can be thought of as underlying questions.    To what extent is a document magisterial, especially when it introduces an innovation?  Indeed, what is the line between development and innovation?   To what extent may the episcopacy, the trained theologian and the ordinary Catholic have an opinion on a papal statement?  Are there rules of discourse?

Yesterday when I was thinking about this I came across a First Things symposium called The Future of the Catholic Church.   The introductory blurb introduces even more questions:

Is the Second Vatican Council receding in the church’s rearview mirror? Has the Francis pontificate raised new and difficult questions about the exercise of papal authority? Is the Roman Church poised to become non-Western? Can popes and bishops teach effectively in a time of rampant individualism and social fragmentation? In short: Quo vadis?

And there are many more that come to mind.   How important is logical consistency?   What things about Church tradition are temporal and what are intrinsic?    How do you distinguish?   What is the meaning of loyalty?   

Most Catholics have at least a provisional answer to these questions in their lives.   But a default answer is only a starting point.    A small child starts with presuppositions based on his environment.   A toddler already has a whole framework in place before he can speak well.    He does not desert his original fundamental impressions, but he tests them, modifies them, develops them, scrutinizes them, sometimes reverses them as time provides him with more experience and reflection powers.  

   I suppose I am saying something like what Newman expresses much better:

 IT is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge: we allow nothing to stand by itself: we compare, contrast, abstract, generalize, connect, adjust, classify: and we view all our knowledge in the associations with which these processes have invested it.

Of the judgments thus made, which become aspects in our minds of the things which meet us, some are mere opinions which come and go, or which remain with us only till an accident displaces them, whatever be the influence which they exercise meanwhile. Others are firmly fixed in our minds, with or without good reason, and have a hold upon us, whether they relate to matters of fact, or to principles of conduct, or are views of life and the world, or are prejudices, imaginations, or convictions. Many of them attach to one and the same object, which is thus variously viewed, not only by various minds, but by the same. They sometimes lie in such near relation, that each implies the others; some are only not inconsistent with each other, in that they have a common origin: some, as being actually incompatible with each other, are, one or other, falsely associated in our minds with their object, and in any case they may be nothing more than ideas, which we mistake for things.

Insofar as the Church is a Body and organic, with both material and spiritual elements, it proceeds in a similar way, or that is what it looks like to me.   The Church considered as a body on earth has fundamental assumptions which have been given to it by its Founder (I say it rather than She here, because I'm talking about the learning Church, God's flock)  This Church then passes through history with all the learning process that comes about as she encounters different dangers and temptations as well as new insights and experience of the world she is in.   The Holy Spirit guards and guides her, of course;  unlike the human being, she is indefectible and will never choose rebellion or apostasy as a whole, though some or even most of her putative members may.     The story, we know, will have a happy ending.   Our part is to participate in it as true members, friends of the Bridegroom:

 "The Spirit and the Bride say Come!"