Mike Lewis,
editor of
Where Peter Is, is well known for
freely accusing fellow Catholics of “dissent” from the teaching of the Church. Yet he recently published an article at the
website dissenting from the Church’s declaration that its teaching that the sacrament of Holy
Orders is reserved to men is “infallible” and that assent to it must be “irrevocable.”
I discuss this development in
an
article at The Catholic Herald.
You'll recall Robert Conquest's Second Law of Polictics: "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing." Its Catholic version might read: "Any organisation or group not explicitly and consciously orthodox will sooner rather than later become liberal and eventually heretical."
ReplyDeleteBut WPI does indeed claim, and presumably even seeks, to be explicitly and consciously orthodox.
DeleteI must admit I often resorted to it when I was troubled by criticisms of the Francis pontificate, although I was eventually alienated by its leftist agenda.
There is some poor philosophy in the Deacon's original article too. He questions reducing a person to a principle. I'm not defending Balthasar's argument one way or another but his rejection is rather facile when he says "Mary, who is a person, somehow became a principle". The two are not mutually exclusive categories. A principle just anything from which another thing takes its source God is a principle. God the Father is a principle of the Son. I cannot helping wondering whether the author is equating "principle" with "proposition" as "first principles". But a proposition (when it is a premise in an argument) is only one kind of principle. There is nothing bad or wrong with a person being a principle.
ReplyDeleteSeems to me McManus's article was entirely unoriginal clichéd theological slop. I would charitably assume that McManus (like Lewis) may not be intelligent enough to recognize that fact, but it remains difficult to see their efforts as anything like good faith attempts to actually humbly and receptively understand and defend the Church's (actual!) definitive teaching on the matter in question.
Deletetheological slop
DeleteSquared.
For example, I offer you:
Most importantly, students, the vast majority in fact, are less and less persuaded by the standard arguments that exclude women from Holy Orders, and our task as teachers is to welcome their doubts, questions and opposing arguments, listen to them carefully, and acknowledge their brilliance when they are indeed brilliant–not to mention put forth by women who are clearly smarter than we are, such as Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, and others.
THAT's "most important"?
How about mentioning other people lots, LOTS smarter than you, McManaman, like John Paul and Benedict, not to mention dozens of Doctors and Fathers? The ones whom everyone agrees have indeed been given the grace of the ordained ministry of the priesthood in full, which includes (if you should wonder) keeping the Church true to the Truth Jesus spoke to the apostles. Whereas even those women agree they have not been ordained as Catholic priests and bishops. Two aren't even Catholic. They might indeed be smarter than him (no big difficulty there), but if you stand on the shoulders of the Church's past giants, you might see much, much farther than the smartest person in the world standing on the ground.
I suggest he recall why there is a magisterial office at all. And then recall that if the problem is the arguments for (what he should have long since repeated many times in the article) the truth held by the Church, it is often much, much easier to locate excellent arguments by first knowing full well the end result they must produce: mathematicians live with this fact all their lives. There's no shame in relying on the argument from authority for truths that are only knowable because they have been revealed.
On the whole, women are more left-wing and less orthodox than men. Mainline Protestant churches that have ordained women have all drifted into leftist thought and unorthodox theology. This is not a coincidence.
ReplyDeleteThe drift into leftism and unorthodoxy has led to the inevitable decline of these churches. Some mainline Protestant churches have declined so much, they will simply not exist by the end of this century. If the Catholic Church begins ordaining women, it will follow the mainline Protestant churches into oblivion.
You are perhaps thinking of I Timothy 2:11-15? "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety."
DeletePaul has received a lot of harsh criticism from feminists.
DeleteHowever, it's fair to say that the ancients understood human nature and the psychological differences between men and women better than we do.
It would have been more fair to acknowledge that about a week or so before the Herald article was published Mike Lewis had followed the original article with one by himself effectively disowning and apologising for it. The article could still make the point about the original decision to publish .
ReplyDeleteI had not read the article you refer to until yesterday, but it essentially just repeats what Lewis had already said on Twitter in response to critics, which I had read. And it doesn’t change anything. On the contrary, it only makes Lewis look worse, so that it was actually kind of me not to cite his response (albeit that was only because I had a strict word count and lacked space).
DeleteFirst, Lewis does not “disown” or “apologize” for McMananan’s piece. On the contrary, he says: “I believed it deserved a hearing. I still believe that.” Second, he defends himself and the article by misrepresenting it. He speaks as if McMananan’s article merely challenges certain arguments for the teaching against women’s ordination, but not the teaching itself. That is false. The article explicitly says that it could turn out that the teaching “is in the end indefensible,” that it “is not irreversible,” and that “this issue is not at all closed to discussion and debate.” That goes beyond merely saying that the arguments for the doctrine are not convincing. It says that the teaching itself might be wrong. Yet Lewis published the article and continues to say that it deserves a hearing.
Third, Lewis’s follow-up article cites one CDF document but ignores a more relevant one, namely Cardinal Ratzinger’s commentary on Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which states that the teaching against women’s ordination “could not be considered ‘open to debate’” and requires “full definitive assent, that is to say, irrevocable, to a doctrine taught infallibly by the Church.” McManaman’s article unambiguously contradicts these statements. Lewis’s follow-up article continues to ignore this problem. He pretends that the reason people objected to McManaman’s article is “fear” of honest discussion about whether certain arguments for the teaching are actually any good. The reality, of course, is that what they objected to is the suggestion that a doctrine the Church has already declared to be “infallible” and “irrevocable” might somehow be reversed.
It was only in an exchange I had with him on Twitter yesterday that Lewis finally admitted that this is a problem. But it was in an obscure tweet that few will see, and not in the article of his you refer to.
Right. IOW, so Lewis is either a liar, or stupid. (Or both.) The most annoying thing about his article, besides just the glaring hypocrisy of his prissy selective censoriousness, was his studied blindness to obviously necessary distinctions regarding 'dissent' -- like 'dissent' means just one thing and it's intrinsically evil?? Honestly, so stupid. OTOH, I wonder if he might not honestly believe that he's channeling the spirit of the recent magisterium (and in general of the New Order Church instituted by V2) in dissenting from the clear teaching of the previous magisterium, and he's a convinced magisterial presentist: the past is dead, whatever the current pope currently says (or intimates, or implies by his synodal actions!?) goes, anything else is dissent.
DeleteI have been highly unimpressed with Lewis many times in the past, so this mis-step doesn't surprise me. He appears to be strenuously resistant to critical thought of any kind, and to making distinctions. Even in situations where he could have defended Francis's position better by backing away from Francis's glib off-the-cuff blarney and repeating existing Church doctrine, he failed.
Deleteand he's a convinced magisterial presentist: the past is dead, whatever the current pope currently says (or intimates, or implies by his synodal actions!?) goes, anything else is dissent.
This is one of the reasons I have strongly opposed phrasings and ideas like "Benedict's magisterium" and "Francis's magisterium." There is one Magisterium, it is the teaching office of THE CHURCH, there is one Church, and one Holy Spirit guiding it. The teaching office is shared among the bishops, and is under the temporary visible leadership of the pope, but it remains one Magisterium. It is one throughout time.
There's always been an inherent tension in the mission of WPI. On the one hand, there's the crusade against theologians, clergy, and influencers who (in a reversal of the usual conservative position) spent most of the past decade or so trying to neuter the authority of the Pope. On the other, there's an obvious attempt to appeal to young, disaffected Catholics for whom many of the Church's official positions are unpalatable. These two imperatives have always been in conflict, although how much of a problem they turn out to be depends a lot on who we're talking about (Pedro Gabriel, for example, strikes me as a geniune social conservative, whereas the boys from SmartCatholics obviously are not). It's not that the emperor has no clothes at all—given the understanding of development of doctrine that many in the broader WPI orbit hold, there isn't much that's really, truly "irreversible" in Catholic dogma—but it's a real problem.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I don't see why scoring a point against WPI should provide any comfort to conservative Catholic "dissenters." After all, Dr. Feser's conclusion nothing but the old, "If they're wrong about this, we shouldn't trust them about anything" fallacy. It's political, tribal thinking, not serious argumentation. The motives or integrity of the editorial staff at WPI has no bearing whatsoever on their arguments about the deference Catholics owe to the "ordinary Magisterium" of a reigning pope.
'"If they're wrong about this, we shouldn't trust them about anything" fallacy'
DeleteEntirely depends on what it is. If it's as serious as life and death, and it has been consistently taught for 2000 years of Church history, which is the case with the death penalty, you genuinely can't trust the Church on anything if they get something like that wrong for so long.