Since Vatican II...

By: Andrew W Taylor

Since Vatican II, but not because of the actual documents of the council themselves, the energies of the dynamic intellectual tradition of Thomism have been eclipsed by the pop culture offerings of the enneagram, jungian depth psychology and symbolism, transactional analysis,and an overall tendency toward a reductionistic, protestantized catholicism. This phenomenon can rightly be styled the "americanization" of the culture of the universal church, that is, the america of pop culture, historical amnesia, 'I'm OK, You're OK' and "the eclipse of distance"1.

This result has much more to do with a 1960s bourgeois consumerist self-actualisation movement than it reflects an authentic engagement with the real pathologies and particular insights of roman catholicism. And this is unsatisfactory: we were promised open windows on the world, with new access to the rigors in the thought of Chenu, de Lubac, and von Balthasar -- and instead catholics have acquiesced in the dumbing down of the world's questions and conflicts, a lazy dogmatic indifferentism and capitulation to late capitalist culture. We have often merely traded our old saccharin sentimental kitsch for new saccharin sentimental kitsch! (Out with the embarrassing holy card and Latin mass catholicism, and in with the felt banners and 'laughing Jesus' catholicism; out with guilt and scrupulosity, and in with jettisoning the category of sin altogether)2.

No authentic regeneration can come to the catholic church until it has accepted that the difficult, intellectually arduous task of engaging real catholic history and documents is necessary. And this work needs to begin again after many dodges and ducks over the last 50 years. Every authentic christian work begins in a painful embrace of the depths of historical contradictions, mis-steps and dead-ends -- that is the work of prolegomena: "digging a pit for the cross".



1.Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
2. See the former Dominican Matthew Fox's Original Blessing

"Atlantis" by WH Auden

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

Should storms, as may well happen,
Drive you to anchor a week
In some old harbour-city
Of Ionia, then speak
With her witty sholars, men
Who have proved there cannot be
Such a place as Atlantis:
Learn their logic, but notice
How its subtlety betrays
Their enormous simple grief;
Thus they shall teach you the ways
To doubt that you may believe.

If, later, you run aground
Among the headlands of Thrace,
Where with torches all night long
A naked barbaric race
Leaps frenziedly to the sound
Of conch and dissonant gong:
On that stony savage shore
Strip off your clothes and dance, for
Unless you are capable
Of forgetting completely
About Atlantis, you will
Never finish your journey.

Again, should you come to gay
Carthage or Corinth, take part
In their endless gaiety;
And if in some bar a tart,
As she strokes your hair, should say
"This is Atlantis, dearie,"
Listen with attentiveness
To her life-story: unless
You become acquainted now
With each refuge that tries to
Counterfeit Atlantis, how
Will you recognise the true?

Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
That terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Thundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and now, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of the roads,
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.

ON RELIGION BY ITS CULTURED DESPISERS*

(*apologies to Schleiermacher for stealing title)
http://breadandwineculture.blogspot.com/

Why is a political perspective from the Religious Left ipso facto regarded as "sectarian"? It seems that there is a perverse idea in the various Christian communities that the special mission of the churches is to pour oil on troubled waters -- to reconcile the irreconcilable. Social theorists like Gregory Baum and the Liberation Theologians help remove the blinders with which we view our class-society. There may be individuals on the religious Left who sometimes descend to the level of the politically sectarian, but I think it is true much more often that the religious radical's outraged moral vision uncovers the depths of social sin. I think mourning is a more appropriate response to a renewed suspicion regarding our First World ideological distortion than becoming angry at those who are strident on behalf of Social Justice. Speaking now just of Christianity,
there has been a current of prophetic justice protest since the mother of Jesus proclaimed her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) at the annunciation:

The Lord has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has torn imperial powers from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He fills the starving with good things,
sends the rich away empty.
(Luke 1:46-55, NEB)

There is another kind of Left sectarianism with religion, it has shown itself in irreligious progressives who have a reflexive disdain for religion in general and Christianity in particular. For Bill Maher, and progressives like him, (people who have no study in religion(s) and a similar level of adult experience)-- US style Fundamentalism is the operative caricature. This prejudice is intellectually indefensible and politically divisive.

So both the pious and the impious progressives share a bourgeois spirit about religion.1 In the Reformation and then The Enlightenment certain stark and simplistic rationalistic ideas eclipsed the medieval synthesis of faith and reason. The bourgeois spirit is utilitarian to the core: situation ethics rule -- individual opinion about the usefulness of lives becomes the final arbiter of the Good. Not without reason has Rome spoken of the cultural anomie wrought by 'dictatorship' of ethical relativism.2

One of the great contributions of serious theology was "Moral Theology" or Religious Ethics. Western concepts of the dignity and ultimate value of the human person have their origin in acknowledgment of the transcendent mystery who is the gracious presupposition of our common life. The study of serious religion is a good thing for the pious and impious alike.
________________________________
1. See "The Bourgeois Spirit" by Virgil Michel, O.S.B./
2. As in the addresses of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela

VIDEO: Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View

http://rethinkingmarxism.org/cms/node/1198
VIDEO: Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View
Posted October 10th, 2008 by Rick Wolff

"Please find below an incisive video commentary on the current capitalist economic crisis by Rick Wolff. The video taped lecture includes (1) an explanation of what the crisis is and why it happened, and (2) a socialist program to address it (one that uses our class-qua-surplus analytics)."

John Bellamy Foster: Can the financial crisis be reversed?

John Bellamy Foster: Can the financial crisis be reversed?

``Will it work? Can they avoid a massive devaluation of capital across
the board? I doubt it. It is likely too late to stabilise things in this
way. Things have gone too far. The crux of the matter is that the whole
"Atlantic" economy is in trouble, not just the financial sector.
Consumption is collapsing in the United States, where it represents more
than two thirds of total demand, and a good part of world demand.
Fifteen per cent of the population is under water with their mortgages.
Real wages in the United States have not risen since the 1970s and
people are deeply in debt and their circumstances are eroding.
Unemployment is way up and jobs are vanishing. Where the productive base
of the economy is weakening drastically, a falling financial
superstructure, finding the ground shifting under it, is unlikely to be
able to right itself.

``As for the politics of nationalisation of banks in the US and UK, one
should not confuse this -- as is all too common -- with socialism or
even radicalism, unless one is talking about socialism for the rich.
This is just another desperate stop-gap measure aimed at preventing a
full scale debt deflation. But as a sign of the total collapse of the
"US model" of "free market" finance capitalism, the moral and political
consequences are vast.''

Full article at http://links.org.au/node/677

"Let America be America Again" by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Langston Hughes