Working theologies

Regardless of a religion's official positions, it also has a "working theology", a set of attitudes and values and behaviors that reveal an underlying point of view. (In Bionian organizational psychology, this is called a "basic assumption group", the unconscious agenda hidden beneath publicly trumpeted aims.) A great example is the contemporary Episcopal Church, the US Anglicans. Underneath the Bible, the Prayer Book and the Creeds, Apostolic and Nicene, what really drives those folks is "radical inclusivity." One of their own pointed this out in devastating detail. Other groups, both within and beyond that church, embrace vehemently --as the "essence" of Christianity-- this very same theology. Which, being the reduction of a vast bimillenial and complex world-founding religion to two words, is a classical and shameful example of ideology.

After yet another lapse in my addictive and disheartening perusal of PrayTell, it seems to me that for a goodly chunk of the Catholic commentors, certainly of those who are most vehement and passionate, their working theology is a sentimental and resentful stance of Little People Populism vs the Corrupt Institutional Church. The "assembly of the baptized" vs the "hierarchy of the ordained". The Great Washed, as it were, vs The Temple Priesthood. Almost any issue eventually comes down to this theological narrative. Popular power vs traditional power. So what if "the assembly of the baptized" means twelve middle aged white ladies in Virginia Beach?

I would call that attitude Protestant were it not for the fact that it lacks even the basic theological commitments of classical Protestantism: solus Christus, sola Scriptura, sola Fide, sola Gratia. Instead it is merely warmed over secular humanism of the spiritual, adolescent and therapeutic sort.

Of course, radical inclusivity and Little People Populism are rampant in our dissolving culture as well. Which is where these religious folks got the idea. Certainly neither from the Bible nor the Christian or Catholic tradition. It comes down to little more than a spiritualized version of Occupy Wall Street.

What led to this morning's rant was a thread about the current state of funerals in American Catholicism. A dentist from Palo Alto, one of the LPP's on the site, exploded in self-righteous resentment that anyone should care about things like doctrine or liturgical rightness when people were hurting...We should give them whatever they want. I stupidly opined that his viewpoint made people into little combos of victim and consumer. Is there not a crucial difference between pastoral care and customer service? He interpreted this as an attack both on him and his good friend The Lord Jesus. (You can see what a fruitful exchange this was fated to be.)  He was half right.

What I was actually thinking is that I would rather be buried with dignity as Muslim --yes, me-- than subjected to the unmanly sentimental caterwauling and contentless drivel that I witnessed at the death ceremonies of my sister, uncle and father. The Great Traditions provide a ritual shape, a containing form, to life, and to death, to time and to eternity. Each tiny individual's life is set in a cosmic context, in a long line of ancestors, before the awful mystery of God, by the rites of death. What we have achieved instead is the reduction of the cosmos and our ancestors' visions to the cramped confines of our current ego and our feelings of the moment. What an accomplishment. I wonder sometimes if the religious and cultural wonders of the Christian Faith and its Western children are not as Newman suspected about the Dominicans in the 19th century, when he considered joining them and abandoned that path: "A great idea, but extinct."

So I let go. Here is the status quaestionis twixt Ex Cathedra and the Tooth Fixer.

by Ex Cathedra on January 30, 2012 - 11:29 am

At the last three American Catholic funerals I took part in, what I saw was –with little exception– the collapse of Catholicism in the triumph of the therapeutic, of the worst of the sentimentality of the surrounding Protestant culture, and at the place –death– where you would expect the Christian rubber to hit the road of real life, the surrender of vivid proclamation from a profoundly sacramental, ancient, and world-creating faith with content and confidence to vague accomodationism and comfortable platitudes, reduced to the horizons of the egos in the room at the time.

by Dr. Dale Rodriguez on January 30, 2012 - 12:15 pm

“reduced to the horizons of the egos in the room at the time.”
I think the only ego in that room was yours.




I need a Twelve Step Program for Compulsive PrayTell Reading.


Update on Jan 31. I am feeling better today. Finding all this kind of funny. But the Tooth Doc is still roiling, not having a good day. Someone else provoked his populist conscience worse than I did. (I did a little editing to translate abbreviations for the non-specialist.)

#94 by Dr. Dale Rodriguez on January 30, 2012 - 8:57 pm

If you don’t like it then go to a Latin Mass and leave the rest of us alone.
Typical. You are upset that catholics “disparage” the Latin mother tongue but you have no problem “disparaging” fellow catholics. Then you talk about “lack of charity”. Christ will use the same yardstick you use on others to judge you.
ps go back to the "New Theological Movement", you guys deserve each other.

Lost grandeur of the Native Peoples

of Asia Minor.

The Greek peoples had inhabited Asia Minor for 2000 years before they were finally conquered by the invading Muslim Turks*, harbingers of the Religion of Peace. In the mid 500's AD, these now-Christian Greeks, inheritors of Old Rome, built the largest and most astonishing  church in the world in Constantinople, the last capital of the Empire's thousand years.

With the minarets added by the conquering Turks.

 As it was, with forecourt and, to the right, the baptistry.

Hagia Sophia --Holy Wisdom-- is now a museum, having been reduced to service as a mosque from 1453 until the secularizing Ataturk created Turkey out of the post WWI ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
The current successor of Constantinople's patriarch, and his Greek church in Turkey, is holding on by his fingernails. Thus the eventual fate of all non-Muslims under the rule of the totalitarian Religion of Peace. (Ask those other Native Peoples under Islam, the Egyptian Copts, how things are working out for them under the Arab Mohammedans.)

The enormous dome

Here's screenshots from a rare barebones reconstruction --the original would have been full of mosaic images and precious metals and lamps under its enormous dome

...and people-- of what Justinian's masterpiece would have looked like in its prime**.

In the middle of the space was the Bema, the elaborate pulpit used for reading the scriptures, chanting the psalms, and preaching.

In the apse at the east end was the enclosed Sanctuary, surrounded by a low wall and pillars, with curtains and doors, the altar inside under a ciborium or baldacchino, and in the curve of the apse, amphitheatre-like seating for the many priests, with the throne of the Patriarch at the center.

The icons on the wall grew more prominent over time until now the Eastern churches influenced by Constantinople have an iconostasis, a wall of images, separating the sanctuary from the rest of the church. Although the central bema, as an architectural piece, has disappeared, much of the Eastern liturgy still takes place in the center of the space as well as behind the icon screen.

There is a legend that when the early Russian Prince Vladimir wanted a new religion to unify his people and kingdom, he sent emissaries to the Latin Catholics, the Greek Orthodox and the Muslims. The Orthodox won out because the visitors had attended the liturgy in Hagia Sophia and declared that they thought they were in heaven itself.




*Would it not be politically correct to call the Greeks the "Native Turks"?

**To be fair, Hagia Sophia had seen hard times before. Aside from earthquakes and iconoclasts, the disastrous 1204 looting by the Latin Crusaders took a heavy toll, from which the city never really recovered.

Silly Files

A series of X-Files episodes that are particularly overwrought. Skully no longer acting like a competent FBI agent but a helpless, breathy girl. And talking about deciphering writing from "an ancient Navajo alphabet"....which, of course, never existed.

Ideologies of time

I can't stop checking out the slow motion train wreck at the PrayTell blog.  The man who keeps whining repetitively that "they" stole "his" Mass and so now he doesn't go to church because what happens there "isn't Mass anymore." God, I'd like to smack him. Fuckin' baby. And the usual crowd, who will jump on anyone who disagrees with them, piling on accusations, namecalling, requirements for documentation, condescending outrage, etc. treat this man as if he were a sacred wounded and abused two year old. In the trade, it's called "enabling.

One of the recurring themes has to do with valuing things based on their age. "Well, that's just a medieval accretion" is one way of dismissing an idea or practice. But is the problem that it's too old, dusty and medieval, or not old enough, coming long after the New Testament? One of the more annoying women, the "We are Church" type, who has read a few books, today dismissed the Roman papacy because a professor recently wrote that prior to the end of the second century, the monarchical style did not exist. So I guess that makes it illegitimate for the Pope to rule the Catholic Church because it only started 1725 years ago? It's a quirky novelty?

On the other hand, Catholic feminism, all of ten minutes old, is revered as a Blinding Revelation of Higher Revolutionary Truth. "The Gospel and the Gospel's ways lay hid in night/ God(dess) said, "Let Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza be! And all was light!" (Apologies to Alex Pope).

You can smell the adolescent oppositional-defiant syndrome.

The Dominican house I lived in had decided to remove the rosary from the belt of the habit, because St. Dominic hadn't worn one; it became part of the outfit later on. But of course, St Dominic wore his hair in a tonsure and didn't have the flowing sleeves OP's now wear. The real issue, of course, was that the friars didn't like the Rosary*. (Or the tonsure, but the sleeves were cool.)

Hardly anyone is consistent in their ideology of time. It gets played out in politics, too. Conservatives tend to value a thing the older it is, liberals much less so. Unless, in both cases, it suits their ideological purposes. Conservatives say, "It's tradition." Liberals say, "So what?" Liberals say, "It's new and progressive." Conservatives say, "So what?"

*I never liked it either, to be honest. I appreciated it from an intellectual viewpoint, but hated reciting it. Especially in a group. My alcoholic great aunt helped me out with that when I was a child and had to say it as a penance or something. For those of you outside The Fold, the rosary beads are for counting a series of prayers, anywhere from five to fifteen sets of ten Hail Mary's preceded by an Our Father and closed with a Glory Be. My aunt told me that since God wrote these prayers and already knew them, there was no need to say the whole thing. Just the first two words of each one. I bought that one. Made it less boring.

War Horsesh**

A friend took me to a matinee of War Horse. He paid, but only matinee prices. So I feel fine in saying the Academy-nominated Spielberg movie --while technologically impressive and with some powerful battle scenes-- was largely a waste of time.

A Ms Laura Steff at The Huffington Post opines at those of us eye-rollers:

To those who roll their eyes at the movie War Horse being nominated this week for a Best Picture Academy Award, let me say this: The movie is not, as some of those who haven't seen it suggest, just another sentimental story about a boy and his horse. It is not even primarily about a horse in the sense that the original British stage play is.

The cinematic version is much more. It is a story about the greed of the wealthy -- in this case, an English landowner -- and the powerlessness of the poor -- a family that grows turnips on the squire's land. We are reminded that poverty can tear a family apart, in this case pitting father against son and leaving mother to broker the peace.

The movie is also, and primarily, about awful, bloody, World War I ...

 But as a Steven Spielberg movie in IMAX format, War Horse assaults us, both our mind and our body.

It conveys as clearly as any movie I've seen the utter horrors of war, the moments of grace that can occur between enemies and the costs to ordinary men and women who only wish to plow their fields and harvest their turnips.

Well, thank God it's not just a shamelessly sentimental and compulsively manipulative story about a boy and horse, but also about cartoons of greedy rich people, --ooooh----powerless poor people ---aaahhh--and the horrors of war ---eeeeeeh. So much less cliched. Not at all like an extended Dickensian version of Lassie, where the brave pup is stolen by bad people and while Timmy and his poor but plucky Mom weep at home, fights through danger and pain to get home by walking 800 miles in the snow.

At several moments, the very mildly etched characters make 90 degree turns you never saw coming, just to insure a link to the next heart-rending moment. Anyone ever heard of script continuity?

What this HuffPo woman, a "Pulitzer Prize winning journalist" --explains a lot-- fails to mention is that the whole plot is set in motion in the first place by the utterly irresponsible, self-destructive and free whim of the "poor turnip farmer."

And of the central equine hero, "Joey" the miracle horse, even my generous friend, who seemed to like the film, said, "He was no Mr. Ed."

Skirting the dark labrysrinth

Doing some continuing ed for my license renewal this year, a transgender issue came up and I decided to head into cyberspace to check it out. Well, as things go, one link led to another and I found myself reading the feverish, grim and fanatical sites of the Sexually Offended Marginals. One woman, a very, very butch lesbian enraged by her invisibility as a Butch Woman --she is frequently taken for a man, and understandably-- is also dead set against transgenders, most especially ftms. It's just "self-hating and pointless self-mutilation in hope of escaping the masturbatory Male Gaze. You're not born in the wrong body. You're born in the wrong society!" Alice in Wonderland, with a dash of Stalin and Queer Theory. And some transgender sites have her in their sights for legal action. One flower child lovingly and tolerantly opined that since "we" are all one in our sexual orientations, as a community, we must do everything we can to take down "haters" like her. The victim-tyrant dynamic runs rampant.


And people think that religion makes you crazy.

Had some flashbacks about the grimly self-righteous and endlessly self-parsing identity groups, especially of wymyn, among the Queers back in Toronto when I worked in the AIDS field. Dark stuff, airless and deadly. And, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty nuts.

One thing

In National Review, VDH asks the above question. Without reading his answer, I can offer one of my own.

Newt's dalliances show that female sexuality is far more provoked by power and money than by looks.