Regensburg Revisited (Part 3): Interview With Father James Schall

January 28, 2009 in catholic, Christianity, church, Ethical/Moral, philosophy
Tags: Christian, Father, Fides et Ratio, interview, james, logos, modernism, Part 3, Regensburg, Revisited, Schall, science, technology, truth

WASHINGTON, D.C., OCT. 11, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture not only pinpoints the heart of the current international situation, but also reality itself, says Father James Schall.

In the third and final part of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall, a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University, comments on what he says is one of the most important discourses of modern times. 

He is the author of “The Regensburg Lecture,” published by St. Augustine’s Press. Part 1 , Part 2 .

Q: How do you see the Regensburg lecture in relation to John Paul II’s encyclical “Fides et Ratio”? 

Father Schall: What Benedict XVI sees is the fundamental importance of “Fides et Ratio” on a world scale, not just with Islam, which was something new in John Paul II’s time. 

John Paul II was rightly taken up with fascism, Marxism and the moral status of the West. John Paul did collaborate with Muslims in several U.N. conferences — Cairo, Beijing — especially about the family, in spite of the differences between Muslim and Christian views on what the family is.

“Fides et Ratio” is the consequence, as it were, of the other two stages of de-Hellenization in Western thought. The second step was with von Harnack who took the consequences of denying that Jesus was divine. He was just human, a nice man. He was a leader or prophet or voice, but he was not the God-man, not the incarnate “Logos.” Thus we did not need theology to understand him; rather, we need the social and historical sciences.

Benedict XVI, as he indicates in his book “Jesus of Nazareth,” is often concerned with the claim of scholarship to unearth the fundamentals of faith by science’s own methods alone. All it can unearth is what is known by the methods, so more and more fundamental things are left out as such scholarship claims priority. 

“Fides et Ratio” is a long, incisive analysis of modern philosophy alongside of the question of what kind of philosophy will enable us to understand what is really revealed. 

The very notion of a “Christian philosophy” arises from the need to understand in terms of reason just what was said in revelation. The use of a Greek word, not a scriptural word, at the Council of Nicaea, as the Pope said, indicated that under the pressure of understanding revelation, the philosophical experience could be fundamental. 

Faith and philosophy are not in contradiction, but are related to grasp the whole of reality. Both are necessary. This is why pure Scripture is not enough even to understand Scripture’s own positions. As Chesterton remarked at the end of “Heretics,” it would be revelation, not reason, which, in the end, said that the grass is green, that reason in faith alone would affirm the ordinary things of reality that the modern philosophers could no longer comprehend. 

Q: In your book, and in the Holy Father’s lecture, there is no effort to “turn back the clock” and deny the achievements of modernism. In what ways do you see an integration of the old and the new? 

Father Schall: First of all the term “modernism” is generally meant to be a declaration of independence of modern thought from what is past, Greek or scholastic. However, thought in modernity more and more loses its moorings in an ordered reality. 

As the Pope points out, the third de-Hellenization is what we call “multiculturalism,” a belief that there is no real truth in any culture so that there are no fundamental issues between civilizations or religions, only a kind of tolerance about truth’s impossibility. 

Despite the claim that multicultural tolerance does not involve violence, its very system contains within itself a tradition within history that does claim that violence is in fact justified by voluntarist premises. In other words, on a purely multicultural theory, there is no reason why voluntarism is not a legitimate position as there is really nothing to oppose it except power. 

The Pope repeats several times that he does not want to “go back,” but he does wish to distinguish what is good and what is not in modern thought and culture. 

Rommen said that the natural law is perennial, that is, it keeps coming back when we reach positions within a culture that normal men of common sense can see clearly wrong. The objective standard keeps calling disorder and injustice to our attention. The Regensburg lecture is an intellectual challenge. This is why it is precisely an academic lecture and not an encyclical; it insists we face the truth and falsity in any culture on the basis of “logos,” of reason. 

You will notice that the Pope brings in the notion of the fascination with mathematics that we found in Plato. He addresses the scientific mind directly and tells it that its discoveries are based on the fact that mathematics and its many sophistications work in reality. There must be a correspondence between principles of reality and principles of mathematics. 

Why is there this correspondence if there is not a realistic philosophy to explain why? And if there is this correspondence, why is there not an ultimate mind that orders all things found with mathematics as well as with its own systems? Much current literature is based on the claims of a new kind of atheism, one that often lacks the intellectual rigor of more classic forms. The confidence of modern atheism does not face the strange correspondences between mind and reality that even science cannot avoid. 

The problem with science is not only what it is, but what are we going to do with it? The classic Greeks were said to have known all sorts of inventions but chose not to pursue them because they understood the dangers they might entail for human living itself. 

The Regensburg lecture gives science and technology their due by pointing out that they are not everything, but what they do is valid for a certain aspect of things. They can only explain what falls to their competence. 

Philosophy, ethics, theology and poetry all reach to realities that are not direct objects of science, to things that are essentially spiritual and nonmaterial. The human intellect transcends its own being to be concerned with all that is. 

We are bewildered if we think that science can explain everything, but this does not mean that what it cannot explain is therefore not explicable. It rather means that other insights and ways of knowing have their own validity. 

The word of the Pope to science is not “don’t be scientific” in the proper sense. It is rather to stop limiting itself to only one concept of reason, a very narrow concept. This concept is good as far as it goes. But it is one that excludes by definition most of the important things men are concerned with. 

The Regensburg lecture takes us to the heart not only of current events, but also to the heart of reality itself. Philosophy and revelation are not enemies of each other, but are directed at one another. The exaltation of man by revelation does not imply that he is not what he is created to be, a rational animal, one who does all he does by “logos,” by reason. 

Man is the glory of God in the sense that God can address his word to him and he can know and comprehend because he is created with the power to know the truth of things. The moral and political life of man is designed to enable us to know what is addressed to us from reason and even, if it happens, from revelation. 

What seems clear about the Regensburg lecture is that the best place to understand our times is in the heart of Rome itself. Here, in the native tongues of recent Popes, in Polish, or German, and, yes, Latin, they speak to us of what it means to be human, to be beings addressed by God in both reason and revelation.

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Regensburg Revisited (Part 2): Interview With Father James Schall

January 28, 2009 in catholic, Christianity, church, education, fundamentalism, muslim, philosophy
Tags: caritas, deus, est, Father, interview, james, jesuit, law, Natural, Part 2, re-Hellenization, Regensburg, Revisited, Schall, voluntarism

Regensburg Revisited (Part 2): Interview With Father James Schall

By Carrie Gress

ROME, OCT. 10, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture, given Sept. 12, 2006, was not only directed at the question of Islam, but also the weaknesses of modern Western philosophy, says Jesuit Father James Schall.

The professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University is the author of “The Regensburg Lecture,” published by St. Augustine’s Press.

In Part 2 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall comments on what he says is one of the most important discourses of modern time.

Part 1 . 

Q: The Holy Father included in his lecture a discussion of the roots of voluntarism, a theological idea that attempts to put no limits on God, defying even reason. What role does this factor play in Islam as well as in non-Muslim thought?

Father Schall: This question, of course, was already in Greek and medieval philosophy. It exists as a perennial issue for the human mind to resolve. Voluntarism did not originate with Islam, except perhaps in the sense that nowhere else has it been carried out with such logical consistency and backed by such force. “Voluntarism” here means not the spontaneous effort to do something to help others of which the Pope spoke in “Deus Caritas Est,” but the philosophic and theological idea that the will is superior to the intellect and is not subject to reason.

The Pope is quite careful to note that the same problem exists in the West via Duns Scotus, the great medieval philosopher and theologian. It goes from him to William of Ockham, to Niccolò Machiavelli and to Thomas Hobbes, and onward into modern political philosophy. I have just been reading with a class Heinrich Rommen’s most insightful book “The Natural Law,” which spells out in much detail why legal voluntarism stands at the basis of modern positivism and historicism, subjects that Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were concerned with.

From this point of view, the Regensburg lecture was directed at the heart of Europe and America, to those “justifications” that are in fact used by its laws and customs to justify the killing of the innocent. The Socratic principle that “it is never right to do wrong” still remains the bedrock of a philosophy not based on pure will.

Pure will can justify anything because it has evaporated any nature or order from man and the universe. Voluntarism allows no grounding for absolute principles of human dignity. If it is asked, if I might surmise a guess, why the Pope chose to begin his lecture with the conversation of the Greek Byzantine Emperor in the 1300’s with a Persian gentleman, it was because it enabled him graphically to state the most pressing issue of our time, not merely “is it reasonable to extend religion by violence,” but is it reasonable to use this violence on any innocent human being.

This is where the Islamic problem, in fact, is substantially the same as the Western problem. Both systems have to resort to a voluntaristic theory of state and being to explain why they are not immoral for using violence against those who are innocent and protected by the divine and natural law itself.

We miss the point if we think voluntarism is not a theoretic system that seeks to praise God in the highest possible way. Voluntarism means that there is no nature or order behind appearances. Everything can be otherwise. Everything that happens occurs because God or Allah positively chose it, but who could have chosen the exact opposite.

Some philosophers, not just Muslim, think that God cannot be limited in any way, even by the principle of contradiction. He can make right wrong, or even make hatred of God his will. It sounds strange to hear this position at first. But once we grant its first principle, that will is higher than intellect, and governs it, everything follows.

This theory is why so-called Muslim terrorists claim and believe that they are in fact following Allah’s will. They might even be acting on a good, if erroneous, conscience. Allah wants the whole world to worship him in the order laid down in the Koran.

The world cannot be settled until this conversion to Islam happens, even if it takes centuries to accomplish. This submission to Allah is conceived to be a noble act of piety. There is in voluntarist principles nothing contradictory if Allah orders the extension of his kingdom by violence, since there is no objective order that would prevent the opposite of what is ordered from being ordered the next day.

Again, I must say, that behind wars are theological and philosophical problems that must be spelled out and seen for what they are. This spelling out is what the Regensburg lecture is about.

Q: Explain why the Pope cites the recovery of a particular kind of reason? He speaks of a “re-Hellenization,” or a return to Greek philosophy, as the solution to the current crisis of civilization.

Father Schall: Actually, the central part of the lecture was rather on the “de-Hellenization” of western culture and what it meant.

The Pope indicated three states: 1) the Reformation position that there was too much philosophy in Catholicism, so that what was needed was a return to the pure Jesus, without the philosophy.

2) The second was the result of the denial of the divinity of Christ, so that, with Adolf von Harnak, Christ was just a man to be studied by science in the universities.

3) The third was in effect multiculturalism, that there was no possible unity on the basis of principle or reason. Everyone was right within his own system.

The tradition from even the Old Testament, as the Pope sketched out, was rather that revelation itself pointed to Greek philosophy. In the case both of Genesis and the Prologue of John, the very term “Logos” was the form in which God chose to speak to us, in the word.

The very definition of God — “I Am” — was clearly something that was comprehensible in a philosophy itself based on reason. The Pope is quite careful to note that Paul’s turning to Macedonia and not to some other culture had to do with a providential decision about what it means to comprehend revelation, particularly the Incarnation and the Trinity, the two basic doctrines that are denied in all other religions and philosophies.

It is because of the unique contribution of Europe that this relation was hammered out, particularly by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and their heritage. To receive revelation of the word, of the inner life of the Godhead, we must have a preparation, a philosophy that allows us to comprehend what it being revealed to us. Not all philosophies do this, which is why it makes a difference what philosophy we understand to be true.

The Pope pointed out that for Kant, reason and revelation are not any longer directly related as being addressed to each other. Faith and reason are two separate things, with no possibility of mutual comprehension, however minimal. Kant is the origin of much subsequent philosophy that has been perplexed, as Gilson showed in his famous “Unity of Philosophic Experience,” by how to put things back together again.

The small error in the beginning leads to a large error in the end, as Aristotle taught us. This Kantian, and before it Cartesian, background too is the origin of the two different concepts of “reason” that the Pope made the key question of modern intelligence and of intelligence itself. The logic of the Reformation’s position on philosophy and its relation to theology led to an attempt to have a pure human Jesus without any real basis in reason to explain why it is credible to believe in him.

The Pope wants to do two things. First he wants to defend science within its own competency, and second he wants science to abandon the “self-limitation” of itself that cannot see the reality of nonmathematical things because being is not limited only to things that can be measured.

This broader openness to human truths that can be known by intuitive reason, love, friendship, suffering or hope is why the Eastern and other religions think the West because of its scientific narrowness has lost its soul, as it appears from their vices, that they have.

Scientific reason, which is not coextensive with reason in its fullness, cannot speak to what really counts in human existence. This distinction between two kinds of reason gives an even greater insight into what this Pope is about. What he is really doing is seeking for grounds, which have to be reason, by which we can approach all religions and cultures, including Europe itself, busily losing not only its soul but its very bodies, as population decline shows.

 

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Regensburg Revisited (Part 1)

January 28, 2009 in catholic, Christianity, church, fundamentalism, muslim, philosophy
Tags: bombings, cultures, Father, interview, james, koran, militancy, Part 1, philosophy, political, Regensburg, religions, Revisited, Schall, suicide

Regensburg Revisited 

Interview With Father James Schall

WASHINGTON, D.C ., OCT. 9, 2007 (Zenit.org).- When one interprets Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture, which he delivered more than one year ago, as simply an address on Islam, one misses the point, says Father James Schall.

The professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University is the author of “The Regensburg Lecture,” published by St. Augustine’s Press.

In this part 1 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall comments on the Pope’s remarks regarding Islam question, but then more importantly, the deeper point of the lecture.

Q: Just over a year has passed since Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture was delivered, followed by an international outcry from some Muslim circles. Was it the Islamic response that prompted you to write this book or was there something else?

Father Schall: Actually, I had read the address before the Islamic response, which took some time to orchestrate. I do not think it was a “spontaneous” reaction.

When I first read the lecture, a day or so after it was available to the public, I went to my class and told them frankly that it was the most important address in modern times. It put everything together. I was not exaggerating.

The Islamic context of the lecture was merely an introduction to what has proved to be an insight into Benedict XVI’s overall agenda, namely, the grounds on which we approach all religions, cultures and philosophies in the name of their truth, in the name of all truth, including the truth of revelation.

Benedict XVI’s sights are by no means narrow. He knows that besides the world of Islam, where most Christians have either left or been driven out, Christianity has only a minimal presence in the great Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist and modern philosophical worlds.

The Pope is seeking a way to see what these worlds have in common and to establish a basis from which each can be addressed in well-grounded terms that cannot be ignored.

Of course, the Islamic reaction quickly made this lecture known throughout the world, something the militants might have had second thoughts about had they realized what they were doing. Many wanted to chastise Benedict XVI for being “imprudent” or “insensitive.” But he was neither.

He addressed an issue that did, to be sure, come to world attention because of Islamic militancy. This issue was stated succinctly: “Is it reasonable, or does God will, to spread one’s religion by violence?” This was a question asked by practically everyone in the world who thought of the implications of “suicide bombings,” or about the earlier holy wars — jihad — in Islamic history, wars largely, though not exclusively, against Christian lands. The issue is the deliberate choice of violent means as the proper way to propagate a religion, together with a theological justification to do so.

The Pope pointed out that within the Koran itself we can find two different answers to the question: one that says “no,” one that says “yes.” The current turmoil in the world is caused by those in Islam who answer “yes” to this question.

The Pope showed a singular courage in his response to the uproar. He did not back down. He merely said that if anyone was offended by the very posing of the question, he was sorry. But it is not legitimate to be “offended” by a serious question, formally posed, in search to the truth of an issue in an academic setting.

But what first interested me in this lecture was Benedict XVI’s more basic concern. This was Europe and the modern scientific mind.

To think that Islam was his main target misses the more penetrating issue that the lecture raised, namely, is the same root cause that justifies suicide bombings at work among us theoretically justifying, by the same philosophic principles, the widespread violent killing of innocent lives?

Militant Islam makes no bones about the idea that it intends to conquer the world for Allah. Thus, there is something starkly simple about Islam, its constant effort since its beginning to submit the whole world to Allah. We tend to think this is fanatical or outlandish. But to many Muslim minds, it is perfectly logical and indeed a basis of action. What the Pope was concerned about was the basis of this claim.

Q: In the book, you compare Benedict XVI’s visit with Pope John Paul II’s first visit back to Poland. What are the similarities?

Father Schall: John Paul II’s first visit to Poland was the revelation of the power of truth against a tyrannical system. It was more than that.

Together with U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s insistence of showing the Soviets that they could not keep up in the area of military balance, and the internal decline of morals and will in the Soviet citizens, the Polish Pope’s brave and firm presence was something that Poles and the world simply wanted to see, wanted to be there. It was a sign that there was something else in the world but political power. Very few western thinkers predicted the collapse of the Soviet system.

By the time of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg visit the whole focus of the world had shifted to suicide bombers, to efforts to pacify Islamic terrorism, either by war or by covert or political action.

The initial political reaction to 9/11 was one that sought to find the terrorists who irrationally caused this astonishing feat of blowing up, before our very eyes, two of the world’s largest and most famous buildings in one of the most famous cities in the world.

Subsequent bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Paris and elsewhere suddenly made the war not between opposing armies but, like the famous raids of the Barbary Coast pirates, sudden incursions out of almost anywhere on almost any target.

A new form of war has been developed which cannot really be explained in traditional western sociological or moral terms. This situation suggests, as the Pope understood, that a much more fundamental analysis of what is going on is required.

What is of importance is that what he found to be the central cause was not something peculiarly Islamic, though it was that too. Islamic philosophy and western philosophy, not to mention Eastern philosophy, often had similar intellectual roots and presuppositions. This is why it is not correct to view this lecture as simply concerned with Islam. It strikes very much closer to home.

Just as John Paul II’s first visit to Poland was a kind light in the darkness of despair about ever doing anything about Marxism, so the Regensburg visit of Benedict XVI was a brilliant flash over the whole of intellectual history telling us what was really at stake. Good politicians trying to do something about terrorism cannot proceed, really, until they know exactly what it is they are opposing.

The fact is, it is not terrorism, a sort of vague abstraction. In this sense politics depends on mind. The Regensburg lecture, as Socrates reminded us in the “Gorgias,” addresses real politics by addressing the issue of why men act as they do and their reasons for doing so.

Q: You called the lecture “one of the fundamental tractates of our time.” Why is that?

Father Schall: The Regensburg lecture has this quality of suddenly illuminating whole fields of knowledge because it knows what belongs where, what the issues are, what is at stake in understanding our times in theoretical terms.

I have even suggested that this lecture brings up again the medieval issue of the harmony of the two swords. That is, what is lacking in the civil discussion is intelligibility of what is at stake, of what in fact is going on.

If we reduce the issue to one of violence by fanatics, we will never understand why political or military solutions, however also needed, as here, will not get to the heart of the problem.

This heart consists in understanding what is going on from a theoretical and theological point of view. The political order is disordered because the order of the soul is disordered, as Plato taught us. It is no accident that Benedict cited Socrates twice in the lecture and found the heart of what he has to say on the side of reason coming from classical Greek philosophy.

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When Bioethics Turned Secular

January 27, 2009 in bioethics, catholic, Christianity, church, Ethical/Moral, God
Tags: bioethics, Corde, Ecclesiae, embryos, england, ethics, Ex, Father, feature, hybrid, interview, Joseph, medical, Physician, secular, Tham, Turned

When Bioethics Turned Secular

Interview With Physician Father Joseph Tham

ROME, OCT. 8, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Recent news on the creation of hybrid embryos in England, and the U.S. debate on the use of embryos in research and cloning, all point to an increasingly secular agenda in life issues.

Legionary of Christ Father Joseph Tham, a physician and bioethicist who recently defended his doctoral dissertation on “The Secularization of Bioethics: A Critical History,” told ZENIT that this is yet another effect of the trend to push religion out of the social sphere.

The author of a book on natural family planning, “The Missing Cornerstone,” he teaches at the School of Bioethics of the Regina Apostolorum university.

Q: Can you tell us something about the religious roots of bioethics?

Father Tham: Since time immemorial, religion has been an integral part of medical ethics. Recent studies have demonstrated that even the Hippocratic oath is a product of a religious community founded by Pythagoras.

In the West, Christianity has clearly influenced the founding of hospitals and the care of the sick. There is a long tradition of medical ethics based on the sacraments and the virtues since the Middle Ages.

Many of the codes of ethics professed by physicians today were undoubtedly of Christian inspiration, and Catholics have produced very sophisticated manuals on medical ethics up until recently.

In fact, if you look at the names of the pioneers in the early days of bioethics, which began in the late 1960s in America, a majority of them were clerics or were very committed to religion.

Q: Why has bioethics turned secular?

Father Tham: In part, there has been a struggle since the Enlightenment to cast religion out of all spheres of society. We can certainly see this happening in the areas of culture, science, economics, law, philosophy and education.

Most people would agree that Europe and many countries in the West have become very secular today, and Benedict XVI has repeatedly spoken about this.

What happened in the ’60s and the ’70s was that many theologians and religious ethicists turned secular. Unwittingly, they have yielded to the secular culture that was exerting a great deal of pressure for them to conform.

Q: What are some of the reasons that caused them to turn away from their religious roots?

Father Tham: The causes are complex, and some of them are, as I said, the cultural ambience of the time. Remember, the ’60s were kind of crazy years. Among these, I will mention two crucial events: one is the secularization of the academy and the other is the theological debates in this period.

Many Ivy League universities such as Princeton, Yale and Harvard were originally founded by Protestant denominations. Religion was practiced and promoted in these schools originally, but at the turn of the last century, partly because of economic pressures and partly to become “inclusive” in the increasingly plural culture, many of these academies dropped their distinctive Christian features.

Catholic colleges and universities were also affected by this desire to shed themselves of their “sectarian” image. Thus, many institutions of higher studies became severed from their religious roots. This is still hotly debated today among Catholic educators, as witnessed by the question of implementing John Paul II’s apostolic constitution “Ex Corde Ecclesiae.”

Since most bioethicists were reared in this academic circle, many of them moved along with their institutions down the secular path.

The ’60s were also a period of theological experiments and controversies. At the turn of the last century, the Protestant denominations were embroiled in the questions of demythologization of the Scripture, Protestant liberalism, the Social Gospel movement, and the “death of God” theologies. Their Catholic counterparts, around the same time, were modernism and semirationalism. All these tendencies came to the fore in the ’60s in leading theological currents.

Vatican II sought to address many of these issues as the Church confronted the postmodern era. However, a major incident that greatly impacted the development of moral theology was the contraception controversy, especially with the issuance of the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” in 1968.

Q: How did this encyclical affect the beginning of bioethics?

Father Tham: As you may recall, “Humanae Vitae” was not well received by many Catholics. Some 600 theologians signed a letter of protest that originated from Father Charles Curran. This definitely undermined the Church’s authority in making pronouncements in the areas of morality.

As a result of this rejection of official Church teaching, many theologians began to criticize natural-law theory, especially its insistence on objective moral evil and absolute norms.

What came as a result of this discontent has been termed the “new morality,” or proportionalism, which has plagued many seminaries and theology departments since then. This was specifically addressed by Pope John Paul II in the 1994 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor.” But the problem persists in many parts of the Church.

Q: Has this affected bioethics directly?

Father Tham: Certainly; proportionalism tends to emphasize the consequences and circumstances of the moral act. When carried to the extreme, it could justify abortion or euthanasia because there are more good consequences than bad ones. It is the common rationale we hear today in many of these bioethical debates where the ends justify the means.

On a historical note, many of the founders of bioethics were disenchanted Catholics who defected from the Church structures to found alternative secular bioethical institutes, and in the process marginalized the input of theology.

Q: Can you give us a few examples of people who were affected by this?

Father Tham: André Hellegers was a gynecologist who sat on the papal birth-control commission established to inform the Pope on the morality of the pill. He was quite disappointed with “Humanae Vitae” and he eventually founded the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown.

Daniel Callahan was editor of Commonweal magazine and was very upset with the encyclical. He co-founded the Hastings Center. Both the Kennedy Institute and the Hastings Center were influential in the early years of bioethics.

Albert Jonsen, Warren Reich and Daniel Maguire were all former priests turned bioethicists, all of them prominent in the field for their secular orientation.

Q: In your dissertation, you mentioned the secularizing effects of bioethics on theologians.

Father Tham: Yes, a glaring example of this would be Joseph Fletcher. He started writing in the 1950s when the word “bioethics” did not yet exist. In those days, he was an Episcopalian priest, but by the 1980s, Fletcher had left ministry and become an atheist, humanist, and member of the Euthanasia Society.

In the end, he advocated not only euthanasia but also non-voluntary sterilization, infanticide, eugenic programs, and reproductive cloning. He even went as far as proposing the creation of human-animal hybrids, and chimeras or cyborgs to produce soldiers and workers or to harvest organs. He eventually died an avowed atheist.

Q: Is there a future for religion in bioethics?

Father Tham: Secular bioethics has been deemed inadequate for a lot of right-thinking individuals, especially when certain academics are proposing such preposterous ideas as infanticide and eugenics.

In addition, many people are dissatisfied with the inability of contemporary bioethics to address the questions of human nature, of suffering and death, and of what constitutes a good life, health and the ends of medicine.

Religion has been addressing these issues for centuries. Hence, there seems to be a ray of hope for theology to play a more significant role in bioethics debates in the future. However, the challenge is great.

There is a need for theologically trained bioethicists, and this would also imply the need to recuperate sound theological investigations, especially in the religiously inspired academies.

I sense that the tide is changing with a new generation of laypeople and religious who are willing confront this secular and relativistic mind-set.

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The Light of Mother Teresa’s Darkness, Part 1

October 16, 2008 in catholic, Christ, Christianity, faith, Jesus Christ
Tags: 1, catholic, church, Father, jesus, kolodiejcchuk Darkness, light Mother, Part, teresa

The Light of Mother Teresa’s Darkness, Part 1

Father Kolodiejchuk on Unity With Jesus

ROME, SEPT. 4, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Feeling or not feeling love, Mother Teresa of Calcutta knew that she was united with Jesus, for her mind was fixed on him and him alone.

The founder of the Missionaries of Charity expressed this in a letter written to a spiritual director, now published with many other letters in a volume titled “Come Be My Light,” edited and presented by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk.

In this interview with ZENIT, Father Kolodiejchuk, a Missionary of Charity priest and the postulator for the cause of canonization of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, discusses his new book and the interior life Mother Teresa kept hidden from the world.

Q: The extraordinary interior life of Mother Teresa was discovered after her death. Aside from her spiritual directors, how was this life, especially her suffering of spiritual darkness, kept from all who knew her?

Father Kolodiejchuk: No one had any idea of her interior life because her spiritual directors held onto these letters. The Jesuits have some, some were at the archbishop’s house, and Father Joseph Neuner, another spiritual director, had some.

These letters were discovered when we went looking for the documents for the cause.

When she was alive, Mother Teresa asked that her biographical information not be shared.

She asked Archbishop Ferdinand Perier of Calcutta not to tell another bishop about how things had begun. She said, “Please don’t give him anything from the beginning, because once people come to know the beginning, like the locutions, then the focus would be on me and not on Jesus.”

She kept saying, “God’s work. This is God’s work.”

Even the closest sisters had no idea of her interior life. Many would have thought that she would have had a great intimacy with God to keep her going in light of the difficulties of the order and the material poverty she suffered.

Q: The book discusses Mother’s secret vow that she made early in her vocation, where she promised not to refuse God anything on pain of mortal sin. What role did this play in her life?

Father Kolodiejchuk: Mother Teresa made this vow, in 1942, to never refuse God anything.

Her inspiration letters from Jesus soon followed. In one of them, if not both of them, Jesus says, picking up on her vow, “Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?”

So the vow is the background to her vocation. Then you see in the inspiration letters where Jesus makes her call clear.

She then pushes forward because she knows what Jesus wants. She is motivated by thought of his longing and his pain because the poor don’t know him, so they don’t want him.

This was one of the pillars that kept her going through the trials of the darkness. Because of her certainty of her call and this vow in one of the letters she says, “I was at the point of breaking and then I remembered the vow, and that picked me up.”

Q: There has been a lot of discussion about Mother Teresa’s “dark night.” It is described in your book as a “martyrdom of desire.” This element, her thirsting for God, has largely been missed. Can you describe this?

Father Kolodiejchuk: A good book to read to understand some of these things is Father Thomas Dubay’s “Fire Within.”

In Father Dubay’s book, he speaks of the real pain of loss and a pain of longing, with the pain of longing being more painful.

As Father Dubay explains, in the path to authentic union with God, there is the purgative stage called the dark night, after this a soul then goes to a stage of ecstasy and true union with God.

The purgative stage for Mother Teresa seems to have been during her time of formation at Loretto.

At the time of her profession, she said her companion was most often the darkness. The kind of letters that you read there, in the dark night, are typical letters you would read of someone in the dark night.

Father Celeste Van Exem, her spiritual director at the time, said that maybe in 1946 or 1945 she was already close to ecstasy.

After that, there is a reference to when the inspirations and locutions came, when the difficulty against faith stopped.

Later she wrote to Father Neuner, explaining: “And then you know how it worked out. And there, as if our Lord just gave himself to me to the full. The sweetness and consolation and union of those 6 months passed but too soon.”

So, Mother Teresa had six months of intense union, after the locutions and ecstasy. She was already in the real transforming union. At this point, the darkness returned.

But now, however, the darkness she experienced was within that union with God — so it wasn’t that she had the union and then lost it. She lost the consolation of the union and alternated between the pain of loss and a deep longing, a real thirst.

As Father Dubay said, “At times the contemplation is delightful, and at other times it is a strong thirsting for him.” But in Mother Teresa’s case, apart from one month in 1958, she did not have this consolation of union.

There is one letter in which she said: “No Father, I am not alone, I have His darkness, I have His pain, I have a terrible longing for God. To love and not to be loved, I know I have Jesus in the unbroken union, for my mind is fixed on him and him alone.”

Her experience of darkness within union is very rare even among the saints because for most, the end is union without it.

Her suffering, then, to use the Dominican theologian Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s term, is reparatory, much more for the sins of others, not purificatory, for her own sins. She is united to Jesus in enough faith and love to share in his experience in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross.

Mother Teresa made the comment that the suffering in the Garden was worse than the suffering on the cross. And now we understand where that was coming from, because she understood Jesus’ longing for souls.

The important thing is that it is union, and as Carol Zaleski pointed out in her article in First Things, this kind of trial is a new kind of trial. It is a modern kind of experience for the saints over the last 100 years or so, to suffer the feeling that one does not have any faith, and that religion is not true.

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