Book Review (sort of): My Battle Against Hitler

This is a very belated book review. I was in England when Dietrich von Hildebrand's edited memoirs “My Battle Against Hitler” were first released, and I could not get a review copy until I came back to the States. Even then, it was a challenge for me to read the book, first of all because the only format I could obtain limited me to reading it on an iPad (no treat for tired eyes), but more importantly because the book itself is so dense. We are talking, after all, about a philosopher's memoirs of a philosophical and political battle against an all-encompassing ideology. At times it was a struggle for me to get through. I do not have a strong background in 20^th century thinkers, and von Hildebrand seemed to have been friends or at least colleagues with all of them. I didn't know anything about the Austrian experience of the Anschluss outside of some scenes in The Sound of Music, but now I know enough to even use the word appropriately (pronunciation is an altogether different question).

Suffice it to say, this was not a quick read, but now that I am (getting around to) writing about it, I am realizing how much I got from the book—and how unnervingly timely it is. Von Hildebrand, who was born at his family's villa in Italy but educated in Germany, perceived very early on just what kind of a menace Nazism was, thanks to his youthful philosophy studies under Edmund Husserl (the same Husserl alongside whom St Edith Stein would soon enough be working) and his friendship with Max Scheler (whom St John Paul would credit as providing one of the two “great philosophical revelations” in his life).

From Scheler, it would seem, both von Hildebrand and the future pope learned to approach qustions and issues from the standpoint of human dignity. It was “the depersonalising tendency of National Socialism” that provoked von Hildebrand's laser-like attention. In writing his memoirs some thirty years after so many experiences, it is this very point that the author keeps returning to. Scheler is also credited, at least in the book's introduction, with the conversion to Catholicism of von Hildebrand and his wife Gretchen. (The “other” Dr. von Hildebrand, Alice, was Dietrich's second wife; it was for her that he wrote the encyclopedic memoirs that are present only in part in the published book.) The motivation? “The Catholic Church is the true Church,” according to Scheler, “because she produces saints.”

Right from the beginning of his teaching career, von Hildebrand faced the challenge of putting his students on guard against the philosophical underpinnings of National Socialism (something his contemporary, Martin Heidegger, would soon be busily propagandizing). Sadly, von Hildebrand was in a minority. Many Catholic thinkers and leaders thought that Nazism was simply “a sign of the times” and had to be taken into consideration, or that it was best to placate the movement as much as possible, in order to protect the Church and its institutions from retaliatory damage or marginalization. This accommodating tendency continued even as Hitler's forces invaded country after country. I was saddened to read that the nationalist fervor was not absent even among the most distinguished religious communities. Von Hildebrand continued to insist that every dimension of Nazism, “its nationalism, militarism, collectivism, materialism, and anti-Semitism were unbridgeably antithetical to Christianity.”

When Hitler came to power, von Hildebrand was effectively exiled. He first moved to Italy, to his family's holdings, and then to Austria where he hoped to be part of an intellectual and political stronghold against Nazism. The annexations, first of Austria and then of France, by the Nazis kept von Hildebrand on the run. He knew he was on their hit list for starting an anti-Nazi journal, and narrowly escaped assassination (unlike the Austrian President with whom he had been working so hard). He fled from nation to nation, finally finding refuge in the US in 1940. The world hadn't even seen what Nazism would still do.

His experience of Austria had been that it was always, in its own way, what we today call “multiethnic”: “it had a supranatural character, not only because it always embraced non-German nations such as the Bohemians, Hungarians, and southern Slavs, but also because it was interiorly united and formed by an ideal that was religious, multi-national, cultural and dynastic in character.” What the Nazis brought was “the great heresy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: nationalism.” “This terrible error... [starts] with the identification of nation and state and reaching all the way to committing idolatry towards a nation, that is, making the nation the highest criterion for the whole of life and making it the ultimate goal and highest good.”

It is hard not to read those words of von Hildebrand's in our current political setting and not feel unsettled. We need von Hildebrand's critique now as much as the complacent people of Germany and Austria needed it almost a century ago. What I want to take from this book is his centering (as St John Paul did, and as Pope Francis is modeling for us now) on the person. Any time we find ourselves expected to sacrifice a person to an ideal, every red flag ever flown should go up.

“Genuine patriotism and nationalism are as different from each other as the true, divinely ordained love of self is from egoistic self-love. ...The first characteristic of nationalism is thus a collective egoism that disavows respect and concern for foreign nations and evaluates the rights of one's own nation according to criteria different from those applied to other nations.” “Nationalism is also present wherever the nation is ranked above communities of even higher value, such as larger communities of peoples or mankind as a whole.” It doesn't take laser vision to see this sort of thing spreading like a virus through contemporary social media.

So. A tough read, but a worthwhile (maybe even necessary) one.

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More books by/about von Hildebrand, who was also a kind of proto-Theology of the Body writer:

Free (my favorite word) and Not to Be Missed!

This is why I stay on Facebook:

http://www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications/titles-with-full-text-online?searchtype=F&rpp=12&pg=1

Fabulous. Treasure trove of free books (pdfs) on various epochs and styles of art. I am downloading just about everything on Christian art, manuscripts, Caravaggio... Get some inspiration NOW!

Synod Wrap-Up (Hint: It's not really over.)

Image from news.va

Today all the Catholic news and opinion outlets are giving their summary presentations on the Synod, as if it were all over and done. Headlines claiming completely opposite results are flashing by my Twitter feed. Some prominent opinionators are acting as if the Synod document (technically the Synod "report") established new and clear directives for pastoral action, instead of being a summary report delivered to the Pope--who has already said there would be another year's worth of work to be done, based on the bishops' carefully voted-on text.

In other words, the Church's "new" pastoral approach to the needs (and mission) of the family is still a work in progress.

Meanwhile, this document from the earlier
Synod on the Family is still valid.

If anything, we can all try to read the text (once we get an English translation!) to keep up with the journey the Church is making, in order to hear the call to the conversion our own hearts may need to make. Certainly, Pope Francis has not been shy about sounding a call to conversion. Indeed, he has been positively un-Francis like in singling out "the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church's teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families." (OUCH! "Is it I, Lord?")

What is Francis doing? Is he excoriating those who, with great clarity (and at great cost) uphold the teachings and millennia-old practice of the Church, a practice for which heroic martyrs like St John Fisher gave their lives? That hardly seems likely. What he may be doing is challenging everyone: the bleeding hearts of mercy who would dismiss the Gospel as harsh and unfeeling, and the pillars of orthodoxy who fail at times (yes, they do) to consider that objective truth does not always describe a subjective human situation. (Ignorance, I have heard, is the "eighth" sacrament; there are probably many more. God is not bound by the structures he entrusted to the Church.)

I can't really comment any further, since I am still making my way (slowly) through the Italian report until we get the English in hand. HOWEVER I would like to suggest, in response to posts that speak of communion for the divorced-and-remarried "with permission from the pastor" that this smacks more than a little of a renewed clericalism that presumes that the priest can "dispense" with application of the moral truth. It is also, sadly, not hard to imagine people "shopping" (as they did in the case of artificial contraception until that was simply taken for granted) for a "pastoral" priest to get that permission. Nobody grows spiritually from that. Reference to the "internal forum" (reportedly in the text) presumes a rightly formed conscience (that is, one not "conformed to the spirit of this age" as Paul wrote in Romans 12:2), a conscience that does not function in isolation from the pastoral ministry of the Church especially through spiritual direction and the sacrament of Penance. We must wait for the final (and actual) document of the Church next year to know more specifically what the Church's concrete guidance will be.

Liturgy bookshelf

My dear friend Father Joseph Henchey was right. "Sister, life is too short for all the good books there are." He recommended choosing two (or at the most three) areas to focus on in my reading. One of those chosen areas for me is liturgy (another is Theology of the Body, but you probably guessed that).

For "Buy a Nun a Book Day" @Nunblogger Twitter followers and other friends of the Daughters of St Paul stocked our novices library with a great collection of liturgy titles. Before Amazon deletes their "widget" function, I decided to recreate their new bookshelf for you in case you are looking for some good titles on areas related to the liturgy (including liturgy and the arts). Since the service is limited to ten titles at a time, I have a few "bookshelves" of recommended reading (sorry, the widgets don't work on mobile screens):

Pope Francis, the Synod and the Witness of Joy

By now, most Catholics have heard the story. I heard it myself from a priest who had worked with Bergoglio through the years, and then met him as Pope during that first year of this pontificate full of surprises. Father José shook the Pope's hand and then asked him frankly, “What is going on? All those years I never saw you crack a smile and now this?”

 

And the Pope explained that after the votes were read, and he said his yes, he left the Cardinals and went to a small chapel to pray. “I felt something come upon me, and it hasn't left yet.” 

We are witnessing the unexpected, uncontainable power of the Holy Spirit.

Francis is happy without being young or rich or physically attractive. He's happy with the happiness of the beatitudes, and that's a sign of the Holy Spirit. It was Paul who told us that the fruits of the Spirit were “first of all, love, joy, peace, patience.” Paul pointed to these as evidence that the Gospel he preached was true. It was so manifest, it supported all his other assertions. Best of all, when people witness these signs of God's presence, they can't help but think, “I want that!”

There's something else.

As attractive as Pope Francis with that authentic joy, people can tell he is not under any kind of pressure or constraint. There is no goad, no negative provocation, no force. He is clearly not acting from a dry, grinding sense of obligation. Joy and freedom go together.

I see Francis as Peter in the mode of—you won't be surprised—Paul. He is a free man.

Free from political correctness; free from cultural norms that have nothing to do with the Gospel; free from the pressure of people's expectations. He is not beholden to anyone.

He is free from anxiety, free from fear, free to transcend—and this was a big part of his message here in the United States—free to transcend every form of polarization. He's not afraid of listening to people who disagree with him even on fundamental things. “Division of hearts doesn't overcome any difficulty.”

His freedom is united to a unique kind of patience: Francis is willing to let things play out, without skipping steps to get to the goal, without trying to “force solutions” (as they say in the 12-step programs), because his freedom is not based on optimism, but on God.

He doesn't have to conform to anything but the Gospel, and neither do we. The Holy Father's freedom is a witness to his profound security, and to the trustworthiness of God, of the Gospel, of the Church.

It is this same freedom-in-patience that the Pope is exercising (and calling for) in the messy process of the current Synod. Pope Francis is confident that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church, and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear.  

It can be a temptation to take a headline about the Synod far too seriously and run with it, whether into euphoria or into dread. How can you foster the presence of the Holy Spirit in your own soul so that you will be a sign of God's faithfulness for the people around you the way Pope Francis is for many people around the world?

St Paul and the discovery of Original Sin

Today's first reading (so influential in the history of theology, and in particular of the theology
concerning Original Sin) reminded me of just what an "original" thinker Paul was. Back in his day, nobody taught about "Original Sin." The story of Adam and Eve was not a dominant theme in ancient Judaism, nor is it today. It seems that it was Paul who recognized something deeply revelatory in this ancient tale. Come to think about it, it almost had to be Paul to draw from the ancient and rarely remarked upon story of the origins of evil, reinterpreting it in the light of the Risen Christ. At any rate, that seems to be what happened.

Paul, smitten with "Christ and Him Crucified," the paradoxical "power and wisdom of God" that manages to simultaneously fulfill and evade the expectations of "Jews and Greeks alike," realized that if we are saved by something as unique and unsurpassing as the death and resurrection of the Son of God, then what we are saved from must have been just as fundamentally life-altering and on just as wide a scale as the redemption. If "Christ died for all" it can only be because "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," and as far as Paul could look back, the only point in time when "all" sinned was in Adam.

Really dense reading but worth it.

We owe to St Augustine the elaboration of the concept of Original Sin, and there have been attempts through the centuries to develop other approaches that take into full account the universal need of redemption, the drastic "price" of redemption, and the dogmatic truth that original sin is passed down "by generation, not by imitation" (that is, that it is "hereditary"). There haven't been a whole lot of viable contenders in the development of a theology concerning Original Sin since the 5th century, except perhaps for James Alison, whose "The Joy of Being Wrong" presents us with a very robust theology indeed of this "happy fault." But one real stumbling block for modern thinkers is the whole hereditary aspect: Can something fundamentally spiritual in nature (the absence of sanctifying grace and a tendency to out-of-control desires) be passed from parents to children like some sort of genetic marker?


Turns out: maybe so. Not in the strict sense, of course, but in a way that very well could be consistent with the dogmatic truth (a matter of faith) that sin (understood as concupiscence) is not something we acquire in a strictly external way ("not by imitation"). Alison uses the insights of Rene Girard to show that human development is unavoidably imitative, and that our thought-patterns, language and even our desires are and can only be acquired by our interaction (begun in the womb) with those around us who model what is good and to be pursued, or harmful and to be avoided. Our minds are very much "conformed to the pattern of this world" (see Romans 12:2) until we are "in Christ."

But there are new insights coming from the field of epigenetics that are even more striking (and that can more easily reconciled be with the theological insights of the past). Scientists are finding that traumatic or stressing events rewrite aspects of the genetic code of invertebrates and other animals in such a way that those changes are passed down, yes, "by generation, not by imitation." These are not changes in the DNA itself, but in a "tag" or "footnote" associated with the DNA. Offspring are born with the innate tendency toward whatever behavior was "learned" in response to the original trauma. While the science (as regards human epigenetics) isn't in yet, the field does seem to be pointing in that way.

It's not that I expect theology to be validated by science, of course, but this might be one of those areas in which science could give some support to the earlier, pre-scientific (and much pooh-poohed) way in which a theological truth was expressed. It could be that those old Apostles and Fathers of the Church were on to something!

Synod calls for ... something that's been around for 30 years

The headline on social media was from the Catholic News Service: Synod Calls for Bible-Based Presentation of God's Plan for Family

Here's a sample:

English Group B, chaired by British Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, suggested that in presenting the "divine pedagogy" or the revelation of God's plan for the family, the document "begin with Genesis, which already provides a definition of marriage as a unique union between a man and a woman, so total and intimate that because of it a man must leave his father and mother in order to be united with his wife. This account of the creation of marriage presents also the three basic characteristics of marriage as it was in the beginning – monogamy, permanence and equality of the sexes."

I am mystified that a Synod Father seems so unaware that Pope John Paul II spent five years presenting "Human Love in the Divine Plan," a massive undertaking that started right where  Cardinal Nichols proposes: with the "Original Unity of Man and Woman" in the Book of Genesis.

If I could, I would send a copy of John Paul's texts to every member of the Synod, but lacking that possibility, I put out a few tweets and tagged Synod members like @CardinalNapier (who has actually been communicating with me via Twitter). The Cardinal Archbishop of Johannesburg (South Africa) seems to think of Theology of the Body (TOB) in terms of helping teens form a healthy understanding of self and of sexuality. That's an important pastoral goal, but I can see where an Archbishop would not spend a lot of time delving into something that was really the responsibility of  pastoral staff and youth ministers. But how did TOB get assigned to the "teen sexuality" category?

I suspect this is because many people have promoted TOB as a non-graphic "Catholic sex ed." (Not everything that claims to be TOB presents Pope John Paul's Theology!) I learned a few years ago that because there are strong Theology of the Body programs and movements in the US, Church leaders in other parts of the world think of it as an "American" phenomenon that does not respond to the needs or culture of their local Church.

What is Theology of the Body, if not a Catholic sexuality program or an American fad? I see it as a fairly comprehensive presentation about what it means to be the image of God as bodied creatures: why the body is the person and the person is the body; the "language" of the body (which is precisely what is denied by the "gender ideologies" that the Synod participants are rightly concerned about); the resurrection of the body--and so much more, so many of them themes that contemporary believers are quite confused about, so much so that we have Catholics who believe that "I am not my body" or that reincarnation is what the Creed means by "resurrection of the body."

 
Pope John Paul also dealt at length with the the Original Sin and what that did to the original "communion of persons" in which man and woman were created (his presentation on original innocence is breathtaking, and makes the introduction of shame all the more striking); the Pauline/evangelical theme of continence for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and finally--after so many things have been parsed in the light of the Bible--makes clear how artificial contraception contradicts the fundamental "Law of the Gift" that is the only way human beings can find fulfillment. "Man can only find himself through a sincere gift of self" (Vatican II) could be the subtitle of the entire series. (It has certainly been the theme that has most impacted my life since my discovery of TOB in 1983.)

For those who have discovered it, Pope John Paul's reflections on what it means to be made in the image of God are broad, astounding and life-giving. It is the Bible, packaged in terms of the unavoidable experience of being "in the body." For me, it was also the theological message that expained why it is so fundamental to our Christian life that God is a Trinity; that the Trinity is not just a weird factoid about God, but the linchpin of all of Divine Revelation. (Hint: The secret is in the "communion of persons": the very mystery of which marriage becomes a creaturely picture.) 

Pope John Paul's Theology of the Body is especially good news for women. How many women start to weep on being introduced to this entirely Christian vision of the person (and of the female person in particular): "Where was this when I got married?!" They feel cheated. And they were cheated if they got married any time after 1985 and their Catholic marriage prep was lacking those enormous insights that the Pope had spent 20 years writing and 5 years delivering.

Maybe that's because John Paul's reflections did not originate with him, but are his theological distillation of the experiences of so many married couples whom he accompanied through the years (from courtship through grandchildren). The Theology of the Body really comes from these Catholic laity. Let them speak at the Synod, too!

Still reflecting on Pope Francis in US

We're already starting to hear the stories—like this one from Sister Hosea on Staten Island,  about the lady she met in a church parking lot on Sunday. “I haven't been to Church in ten years, but Pope Francis is making such a difference. As of today, I'm back.” Last week in Cleveland, the young woman at the table with me at a fund-raising dinner said that her boss had gone to Mass that Sunday: for the first time in 25 years.

Just a few weeks ago I read something that a Latin American bishop had written in the '70s. It said a lot to me about what we non-Latinos are experiencing with Pope Francis: 

A bishop can communicate the things of God and interpret history and human problems only in terms of the depth of faith. To be a sociologist, economist, or political scientist is neither his competence nor his task. He is simply a man of God in the service of all his brothers and sisters.... A bishop is not a technician, an administrator or a boss. He journeys with other people, sows hope along their path shares their sorrow and joy, urges them to seek peace, in justice and love, and teaches them to be brothers and sisters...

 I don't know if Jorge Bergoglio ever read those words of Blessed Oscar Romero, but this was the environment of the Latin American church; this is the setting in which the Holy Spirit formed him into the kind of shepherd he is proving himself to be. Maybe that is why before the conclave, when the news media were touting their lists of papabili and seeking interviews of the few Cardinals who were willing to talk, one anonymous Cardinal was quoted in the Italian papers as saying, “I don't know why nobody's talking about Bergoglio. Four years with him would change things.”

“The Francis Phenomenon”  seems to be so uniquely captivating... seems to actually take us back to the magnetism, the fascination of the ministry of Jesus.

This isn't at all to to discount the powerful experiences we had as a church in the ministries of JP2 and B16, but now we have social media with millions of active participants, interacting with one another on a massive scale, amplifying the Pope's presence and his message, sharing insights and experiences.

We've been witnessing this for almost three years now, and the secular media, for all the bungled, breathless headlines, has been our ally. Whatever it is, for better or for worse, you know people will be talking about it for days. The whole phenomenon frees us all to be openly Catholic, because Pope Francis is a walking commercial for the Catholic Church. 

It's true, the media snap things up and get it mostly wrong in sensationalized headlines. We're all challenged, aren't we, not to react to the headlines but to go to the Vatican news service and read what the Pope actually said (and to whom). As always, of course, the Pope presumes that we will interpret his words through the lens of Catholic orthodoxy. (St Ignatius commented that this is an obligation in charity even in the case of things our fellow laity say, so all the more is it a duty when the words are those of the Pope!)