“How do you know?” – How do you begin to know?

Before we go too far into PRRD, Muller clarifies a couple of things about how the Medievals thought about religion. Keep in mind, too, that Muller is distinguishing “the Reformers” from those writers who followed, the “Reformed Orthodox”, in order to show both “continuities and discontinuities” from the times of the Reformers (including Calvin) until the later “Reformed Orthodox” writers of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, from their actual writings. He does this as a response to some of the “Calvin vs the Calvinists” writers of the 20th century who sought to create a wedge between these two.

I want to reiterate that I’m not picking up this information to suggest that we go back to living and worshiping as these men did. Theirs was a completely different era. And yet today, there is a notion that we must “recover” their “Confession” and their “Theology, Piety, and Practice”.

I’m suggesting that there are tremendous things that we can learn from these generations of writers, without “recovering” their every move.

There is a story from an old book that meant a lot to me as a young man, “The Perfect Joy of St. Francis”. This was a “biographical novel” about Francis of Assisi, who, as we know, embraced a simple life of itinerant poverty, and after whom “Pope Bergoglio” seems to have fashioned himself.

Yes, this is directly to address Scott Clark, and the method of “recovery” that he has adopted and that he has been advocating. But Clark is not imitating Francis of Assisi. In this respect, Clark rather reminds me of “Brother Jack”, a character from that novel (and for all I know, a real-life character) who sought in a very simple way to imitate Francis:

Everything was a peaceful as a scene in the Gospels. Francis was in the little chapel, praying. And Brother Jack was behind him. Whenever Francis bent over, Jack bent over too. When Francis sighed, Jack sighed also. When Francis coughed, Jack coughed after him. That was simply Jack’s way of following Francis …

Thereafter he imitated Francis in everything he did … Jack, like the simple dove that he was, merely said, “Francis is a saint. So if I imitate him, the devil will have no hold on me” (pgs 119-120).

The theologians of this era served their times by thinking through what the Christian faith meant to their own times. They did it using a language (Latin) and a philosophical thought-system (largely Aristotelian) that was prevalent in their own era. They wrote “confessionally binding documents” not for people who would live three and four centuries later, but for themselves … to set themselves apart from their own world, in terms that their own world would understand.

They lived at times when “being a Christian” (and specifically, “being a Protestant”) meant going to war and standing up to persecutions while at the same time producing “a clearer identification of the theological task in its university setting. From the very beginning of Luther’s protest, the university and university-trained theologians were at the center of the movement”.

The great mark of this era was not that the great theologians had somehow conformed themselves to some kind of outward “Piety and Practice” or another (although those things were important too, but not in the “Brother Jack” kind of way). It was because they had thought through the challenges of their own day, and they sought to address those challenges in their own terms.

The Church Prior to the Reformation: Francis and the Jews

Catholic Magisterial Anti-Semitism

As we move into “Reformation Season”, when we contemplate the approach of the traditional anniversary of the Reformation (October 31, 1517), I wanted to provide a few small snippets about the western church prior to the Reformation – the way things were in the middle ages. What follows is a word about the movement started by this current pope’s namesake, Francis of Assisi:

Francis of Assisi, that generous-hearted and anarchic preacher of God’s love, started a great renewal movement in the thirteenth-century Church; in part it was institutionalized as the Franciscan Order of Friars, who did much to revive preaching in the western Church. Franciscan preachers urged the crowds who came to hear them to meditate devotionally on the earthly life of Christ. That had the logical consequence of making the faithful also think about the death of Christ on the Cross, and often this led directly to deep hatred of the Jews. Franciscans thus ironically became major exponents of anti-Semitism in medieval western Europe and were deeply involved in some of the worst violence against Jewish communities; their fellow friars and rivals, the Dominicans, were not far behind.

Not surprisingly Jews tended to live together for safety, a trend which Christian rulers increasingly turned into an obligation: this developed early in Italy and the word ‘ghetto’ to describe such enclosed areas is of Italian origin, although there is more than one explanation of what it might have originally meant. Jewish physical isolation made matters worse, and bred new legends among a suspicious population: that the Jews were ready to poison Christian wells, for instance, steal consecrated Eucharistic wafers to do them terrible dignities, or collaborate with the Muslim powers which threatened the borders of Christendom (Diarmiad MacCulloch, “The Reformation: A History” (New York, NY: Penguin Books, ©2004, pg 9).

For more background, I’ve written a brief series based on David L. Kertzer’s work, “The Popes Against the Jews”.

See also Steve Hays’s article Catholic Magisterial Anti-Semitism featuring Canons from the 4th Lateran Council (1215).

Who “Ruined” the Roman Catholic Church?

Peggy Noonan, the syrupy WSJ writer (and former Reagan speech writer) who famously coined the phrase “John Paul the Great” (whom Neuhaus predicted would usher in “the Catholic Moment”), now throws that hopeful papacy and the Ratzinger one under the bus and signs onto the “Church-in-ruins” model that Francis of Assisi was asked to fix:

One of the most famous moments in St. Francis's life is the day he was passing by the church of St. Damiano. It was old and near collapse. From St. Bonaventure's "Life of Francis of Assisi": "Inspired by the Spirit, he went inside to pray. Kneeling before an image of the Crucified, he was filled with great fervor and consolation. . . . While his tear-filled eyes were gazing at the Lord's cross, he heard with his bodily ears a voice coming from the cross, telling him three times: 'Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.'" Francis was amazed "at the sound of this astonishing voice, since he was alone in the church." He set himself to obeying the command.

Go and repair my house, which is falling into ruin. Could the new pope's intentions be any clearer?

But after the great hopefulness of Vatican II, and the long and “great” papacies of JPII (with Ratzinger as the “doctrinal watchdog”) and then Ratzinger the great theologian, how in the world is “my house” [in this metaphor, the “One True Church”] falling into ruin?

Ruin is a very strong word. In this way, the convert-hopefulness of John Richard Neuhaus, exemplified in his work “The Catholic Moment” and the very founding of the journal “First Things”, is in “ruin”. But never mind that.

She continues:

The Catholic Church in 2013 is falling into ruin. The church has been damaged by scandal and the scandals arose from arrogance, conceit, clubbiness and an assumption that the special can act in particular ways, that they may make mistakes but it's understandable, and if it causes problems the church will take care of it.

What were JPII and Ratzinger doing for the last 35 years? Who were the “arrogant”, “conceited” “clubby” “insiders” who, while promising such hope, in the meanwhile, “shepherded” Christ’s “one true church” into ruin? Where is the “true church” if not in this “visible hierarchy” that was so promised to give the kind of “epistemological certainty” that Roman Catholic converts know to rely on?

It’s not “the liberals” who ruined things. It was the last two popes, the last two “shepherds”.