The Cretinous Doctor

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As ever, the Cigoña blog got it right here.  Whether Bishop Sanchez Sorondo should be described as a cretin, whether his comments should be described as rubbish, whether he is more of an imbecile than Fisichella, are questions of vocabulary and register, but the sentiment is right.

The Bishop is Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, so might be presumed to know a thing or two.  He especially might be expected to know a thing or two about global warming, and, as a fellow Argentine might have had a chat with the Pope before the latter made his recent comments about the sky falling in man-made global warming in Laudato Sii.  This isn't my argument.  What is, is the amazing comment he made, to a critic who said that the Pope's opinion was purely personal, and that the Church could not have a distinct point of view:

"Once the Pope has taken a position, it becomes part of the Magisterium of the Church, whether we like it or not. It is part of the Magisterium just as the fact that abortion is a grave sin is part of the Magisterium."

How very wrong this is: Steinbeck says somewhere something like: "you have to be very clever to be that stupid".  What happens when the Pope decides that diesel cars put far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than petrol ones: does that become part of the Magisterium? Does my Mondeo Estate become a mortal sin?

One effect of this very Latin American papacy is that the sort of carefully described and nuanced differences between the value and importance of papal statements has been thrown away, to be replaced by a sense in which they are simply what the Boss said, and therefore to be enforced by his enforcers. 

Either the Pope knows this sort of thing is going on and doesn't care, which would be scandalous; or he doesn't know, which would be scandalous.

God Help Rome, and all of us.
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BBC Nearly Manages A Catholic Message - But Along Comes Clifford Longley

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One of the reasons there was such a lot of news about the Pope's acceptance of the second miracle meaning that Mother Teresa can be canonised next year is that so many people, including BBC presenters and executives, remember who she was: a tiny little Albanian nun who did really good work in India.  They might not remember anything religious about her, but she was somebody good.  The fact that she was attacked by a Hitchens, probably translated as a plus: he was attacking her because of her religion, but that shone a highlight on how good her religion had made her.

Now this is a load of tosh, but a tosh that opened a tiny gap for a sensible discussion on what being a Saint mans, and what a miracle is.  So yesterday evening The World Tonight had a piece (available here) about 30 minutes in, in which a Humanist lady debated what it meant to be a Saint with a Catholic author and broadcaster: except it was Clifford Longley.

He believes that miracles are out of date, a part of the Church that it has to leave behind, as belief in them makes the Church look mediaeval and superstitious: the Church is moving in another direction and miracles are not crucial.  The fact that Mother Teresa was so far beyond the average do-gooder is what makes her a saint.

Do listen while you still can: surely the Catholic Communications Network, the media arm of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, will already have been on to the BBC demanding that they take down such an outrageous false statement of Catholic belief, and will be warning all print and broadcast media that Clifford Longley is not authorised to speak for the Catholic Church.

They won't of course, and it hasn't hard to imagine that Longley's beliefs are shared by more than one of the denizens of Eccleston Square: a real shame when, for once, the Church had the opportunity to talk to a receptive audience about the supernatural in our religion, but allowed somebody who appears not to believe in the supernatural to represent her views.

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The Incarnation: Islam And Arianism

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Jonathan Miller, I think, once spoke as an atheist about the power, the richness, of the metaphor of a God who enters His own creation to experience it as one of the created.  It is, of course, much more than a metaphor for us, but understanding how powerful a metaphor God-made-man might be to an atheist should help us understand a primary difference between those who believe in the Incarnation and those who don't.

A God who has never been Man is impossibly distant from us. He is everything we believe the omnipotent Deity to be, but infinitely remote.  The Creator-created relationship is akin to that of us making an animated plasticene model: the created has no existence except that the will and whim of the Creator has desired it and the created has no means of influencing the Creator. Submission to the will of the Creator becomes proper religion, and acceptance of the Creator's inscrutable will becomes the only response to whatever the world throws at the created.

This may well sound like Islam, but it is also Arianism, the heretical version of Christianity which seems to have so influenced Mohammed. All of Christianity might have ended up like this, were it not for the fact that the gates of Hell will never prevail against God's Church.

The cosmological impact of God becoming part of His creation must have been something like the Big Bang, but it was at Christ's death, not His birth, that the dead were raised and the veil of the Temple was rent.  When Christ was born, it was in an inn, and the only people who realised were shepherds and foreigners. There was a chosen people before, but now all of Humanity was let in on the secret. 

There are still Arians: Jehovah's Witnesses for example.  Arianism also allows other fanciful beliefs to propagate: that of particular human prophets sent as messengers of God: Joseph Smith, for example, who founded Mormonism. (And what about people, clerics even, who believe that they can change the Church's teachings?)

It isn't hard to see Islam in this context: a misunderstanding of the nature of God leading to a catastrophically poor misunderstanding of the relationship between God and His creation.  If God was Man, the distance between Creator and created disappears; if God was Man, we can appeal to Him in his Omnipotence as an equal; if God was Man, we can want what He wants, and He can understand how and why our wants have been perverted from what they should be, and He can nudge us back towards his path.  If God was Man, we can relate to Him, and He can relate to us; and that means that we can have a dialogue: not a dialogue of equals, because God-made-man is still God, but a dialogue, because God-made-man is man.

That link, and the existence of the Church God-made-man founded when he physically left us, is what makes our religion so different.  We can touch God because he gave Himself to us. He will forgive us when we confess our failings because He understands us as individuals.  He is in all of us and our reward, if we merit it, will not be simply to have the best of what is human, but to become part of what He is.