Ronald Knox on Evangelicalism

To be tied to no dead hand of tradition, bowed down by no cumbrous legacies of antiquity, leaves the mind more free for speculation, and the heart for adventure. But in disclaiming the dead, you are yourself disclaimed by the dead. If you are not prepared to blush for Alexander the Sixth, it is childishly inconsistent to take pride in the memory of Saint Francis. You may claim a kind of sentimental connection with the Christianity of earlier ages, but not a historic, not a vital continuity. The Fathers of the early Church may be your models and your heroes, but they are no genuine part of your ancestry.

- The Belief of Catholics, Chapter 2

Women's Ordination and Gregory the Theologian

As a fairly conservative Catholic who believes that the male-only priesthood is correct, one of the things that bothers me is the really bad arguments that conservatives often make in order to justify the Church's practice.

The problem with most of the arguments I've heard is that they imply that Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood.

Now, this might not sound so bad to a lot of conservatives, but having recently been studying how the early Church hammered out Christology, it strikes me as incompatible with one of the fundamental principles of Christian doctrine.

"That which is not assumed is not healed" -- Saint Gregory the Theologian

If Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood, then following St. Gregory's principle, women cannot be saved. Obviously this is heretical. But it seems the natural conclusion of the arguments conservatives typically use.

So, the trick is to find a way to articulate the necessity of an all-male priesthood without saying that Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood.

Perhaps rather than focusing on manhood/womanhood as if they were things that could be assumed independent of each other, we should speak of Christ assuming Human Nature as a whole, including the sexual differentiation that encompasses both manhood and womanhood.*

Of course, that might mean no longer attempting to use Christ's incarnation as male to explain the all-male priesthood. On the other hand, perhaps there is a way to do so without running afoul of St. Gregory's principle. I'm just not sure what it might be yet.

* The medieval mystics, notably Julian of Norwich, managed to conceive of Christ as both male and masculine while simultaneously feminine (though not female).

Attunement to Being

It is not by means of one isolated faculty that man is open, in knowledge and in love, to the Thou, to things and to God: it is as a whole (through all his faculties) that man is attuned to total reality, and no one has shown this more profoundly and more thoroughly than Thomas Aquinas According to Thomas, what is involved is an attunement to Being as a whole, and this ontological disposition is, in the living and sentient being, an a priori concordance (con-sensus as cum-sentire, 'to feel with', here prior to the assentire, 'to assent to').

Hans Urs von Balthasar - Seeing the Form, vol 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, page 243-44

Fr. Groeschel on Liberalism/Conservatism

"I used to be a liberal, if liberal means concern for the other guy,” Father Groeschel said. “Now I consider myself a conservative-liberal-traditional-radical-confused person.” - From a very good article on Fr. Groeschel in the New York Times

This reminds me of some things that Michael & Katerina have been saying lately.

St. Bernardine on St. Joseph

[St. Joseph] was chosen by the eternal Father as the trustworthy guardian and protector of his greatest treasures, namely, his divine Son and Mary, Joseph’s wife. He carried out this vocation with complete fidelity until at last God called him, saying: ‘"Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord’”." - St. Bernardine of Siena

Sacramentum Caritatis

The Eucharist and Eschatology The Eucharist: a gift to men and women on their journey 30. If it is true that the sacraments are part of the Church's pilgrimage through history (99) towards the full manifestation of the victory of the risen Christ, it is also true that, especially in the liturgy of the Eucharist, they give us a real foretaste of the eschatological fulfilment for which every human being and all creation are destined (cf. Rom 8:19ff.). Man is created for that true and eternal happiness which only God's love can give. But our wounded freedom would go astray were it not already able to experience something of that future fulfilment. Moreover, to move forward in the right direction, we all need to be guided towards our final goal. That goal is Christ himself, the Lord who conquered sin and death, and who makes himself present to us in a special way in the eucharistic celebration. Even though we remain "aliens and exiles" in this world (1 Pet 2:11), through faith we already share in the fullness of risen life. The eucharistic banquet, by disclosing its powerful eschatological dimension, comes to the aid of our freedom as we continue our journey. - Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis

Private Judgement

There is this obvious, undeniable difficulty in the attempt to form a theory of Private Judgment, in the choice of a religion, that Private Judgment leads different minds in such different directions. If, indeed, there be no religious truth, or at least no sufficient means of arriving at it, then the difficulty vanishes: for where there is nothing to find, there can be no rules for seeking, and contradiction in the result is but a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt. But such a conclusion is intolerable to those who search, else they would not search; and therefore on them the obligation lies to explain, if they can, how it comes to pass, that Private Judgment is a duty, and an advantage, and a success, considering it leads the way not only to their own faith, whatever that may be, but to opinions which are diametrically opposite to it; considering it not only leads them right, but leads others wrong, landing them as it may[Pg 222] be in the Church of Rome, or in the Wesleyan Connection, or in the Society of Friends. - John Henry Cardinal Newman

Day and Night

When the father distinguished day from night in his creation of the world, the act that separated them involved a judgment. This one was dark, the other light. But lightness and darkness followed one another more in an alternating sequence than in a relationship of cause and effect. This alternation was a sign that would be furnished to men, a sign according to which they could order their lives: their work and cessation, their activity and rest. the perfection of this ordering was destroyed by the darknesses of sin. But when the Son became man, he did not abolish creation's law of day and night. Instead he simply led it beyond itself by bringing the light of God, so that, with it he could fight against the darkness of hell; he could break through its night with the radiance of this light, not simply to chase darkness out of the world but to fill it with a wealth of meaning.

- Adrienne von Speyr, Light and Images

Speyr was a Swiss convert and mystic who entered the Catholic Church under the direction of Hans Urs von Balthasar.