There’s been a big flap in the news about the fact that Notre Dame invited Barack Obama to be the Commencement speaker this year, as well as awarding him an honorary degree. Various Catholics protested this action.
Out of curiosity, I checked out the Notre Dame website. I see that the president of Notre Dame is Fr. John Jenkins. He’s an ordained Catholic priest.
This raises an obvious question: I assume that as a Catholic priest, he is answerable to one or more prelates in the hierarchy. I presume he took a vow of obedience.
Therefore, I further presume that one of his religious superiors had the authority to order him to either rescind the invitation, rescind plans to award Obama an honorary doctorate, or both. So, assuming that the Magisterium disapproves of what Notre Dame was contemplating, why didn’t anyone in the Magisterium put his foot down and stop it from going forward?
I think it must be very frustrating to be a loyal Catholic layman. You follow your church’s moral teachings. You defend your church’s moral teachings. You protest violations of your church’s moral teachings.
Yet, so often, the titular leaders who issuing these teachings leave you hanging out to dry. They’re like field commanders who order their troops into battle, but when the dutiful foot soldiers look over their shoulders, the field commanders have fled the scene of battle.
This happens over and over again. Zealous Catholic laymen carry the Catholic banner into battle, only to be deserted by their commanders. They volunteer to take up positions on the front lines, but there’s no backup from their commanders. Their commanders sit out the fight. Abandon them to the enemy.
Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with a religious institution in which the titular leaders of the institution almost never exert meaningful leadership?
In ancient times, a commander would lead his troops into battle. That’s what made him a leader. He didn’t order his men to take a risk which he himself was not prepared to take.
But, time and again, the hierarchy indoctrinates the laity in its solemn duties, only to leave the laity holding the bag whenever effective action needs to be taken. Not only don’t their religious superiors lead them into battle, they don’t even follow them into battle. They absent themselves at the first sign of conflict. From a comfortable distance, they watch you cut down by the enemy.
When will Catholic laymen ever learn? How often to they have to have the ground cut out from under them by their own leadership before they wise up? If you keep marching into battle while your commanders are retreating from the battlefield, isn’t it time to cashier your generals?
Why stand up for Catholic teachings when your teachers refuse to stand behind you? If they don’t stand behind what they teach, by their deeds as well as their words, then what use are they? If, time after time, it’s the laity that has to exert real leadership, then why continue to pay lip-service to a spineless, rudderless hierarchy?
Steve: "Why stand up for Catholic teachings when your teachers refuse to stand behind you?"
ReplyDeleteI get the impression from the Catholics I've interacted with, that they are aware of the "bad leadership" (they point to individuals like Raymond Brown, for example) -- they just believe that "the teaching" is pure, and despite the leaders (whom they feel they can "wait out"), they've got the "fullness of the faith" in Catholicism.
"...they just believe that "the teaching" is pure, and despite the leaders (whom they feel they can "wait out"), they've got the "fullness of the faith" in Catholicism."Many Catholic e-pologists actually go further and view the above mentioned dynamic as evidence that the RCC is divinely guided. If the RCC can weather the Raymond Brown's, Liberius, Alexander IV, etc..., the argument goes, that just proves that the "gates of Hell" cannot prevail against it. Not that I personally put Ray Brown into the same category as the others...
ReplyDeleteEA,
ReplyDeleteThat's true. They've created an unfalsifiable belief-system wherein no development could ever count as evidence against their belief-system. If the Magisterium is faithful, that's evidence that the Church of Rome is the one true church–and if the Magisterium is faithless, that, too, is evidence that the Church of Rome is the one true church.
From a Catholic:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.christiandiscussionforums.org/v/showthread.php?t=172131
“Notre Dame, although it is a Catholic School, it is Catholic in identity only. It is run by a lay ‘Board of fellows’. This Board oversees Fr. Jenkins in an administrative capacity and they back him up on this.”
As the president of the university, he has lots of executive authority, does he not? Why didn’t he at least attempt to use it? And if he wasn’t prepared to use it, why didn’t his religious superiors insist that he either use it or take disciplinary action against him in case he refused to use it?
Suppose, at that point, the Board overruled him. Fine. I’m not demanding results. Just a good faith effort to make full use of whatever resources the hierarchy has at its disposal.
“The Vatican has no oversight of Notre Dame, the Bishop of that Diocese has no oversight either, nor do the Holy Cross Priests.”
The logic is pretty straightforward. He’s a Catholic priest–as well as a college president. He has oversight over the university while his religious authorities have oversight over him. Ergo, his religious authorities have some measure of oversight over the university via their authority over the college president (who’s a priest).
If the church is wholly irrelevant to the process, why bother to put a priest in charge of the university in the first place?
“People should learn HOW the University is run before they start criticizing people for not doing anything.”
Depends on how you define “doing anything.” I define “doing anything” as doing something that actually makes a difference, not “doing anything” in terms of empty gestures.
“I would also point out that EIGHTY Catholic bishops sided with the laity on this issue. So much for being abandoned by our leaders.”
A symbolic, ineffectual gesture in lieu of meaningful action. And why 80 bishops? Why didn’t the Pope issue a public statement?
Why does the Pope issue public statements about the conflict in the Mideast, but he can’t bring himself to issue a public statement about the conflict at Notre Dame?
What were they protesting, anyway? The action of university officials?
What’s the point of their protest unless said officials were in a position to reverse course? If so, wouldn’t that include the top official? The college president?
Moreover, my comments weren’t limited to this case.
Take high profile Catholic politicians who support abortion, stem-cell research, sodomite marriage, &c.
Why haven’t they been threatened with excommunication? Why doesn’t the Magisterium even have a general policy on denying them access to the Eucharist?
> "If the Magisterium is faithful, that's evidence that the Church of Rome is the one true church"
ReplyDeleteExactly. And added to this, that "faithful" is defined largely by what current Catholic doctrine teaches.
I have heard converts to Catholicism argue, for example, that artificial contraception, or a [mandatory] death penalty, is so obviously contrary to the will of God that if Scripture, on the one hand, fails to explicitly condemn contraception, or on the other, appears to command the death penalty, then this is ipso facto evidence that "sola Scriptura" cannot be tenable. And guess what? The Catholic Church not only "gets it right" on the formal point by rejecting "sola Scriptura", but also gets it right on the material point of rejecting contraception in principle and the death penalty in practice! Gee, what are the odds...?
There is something of a contradiction, to me, in an former evangelical saying "I converted to Catholicism because (a) I judged that the church of Rome had not deviated from the pure Apostolic teaching, and also (b) I realised that Private Judgment is a heresy, and that it's not competent for me as a lay person to judge whether the Church of Rome has deviated from the pure Apostolic teaching."