A theological debate is being played out in the Catholic world, a debate whose ramifications are large. In its latest iteration, it began with Cardinal-elect Américo Aguiar, the Lisbon auxiliary bishop in charge of preparations for World Youth Day, stating in an interview that “we don’t want to convert these young people to Jesus Christ.” As he later explained, he meant that he wanted to welcome non-Christians without making them feel pressured to convert. But since his meaning was obscure, a number of commentators, including Bishop Robert Barron (who was due to deliver five talks at World Youth Day), clarified that they would welcome conversions to Christ—both the interior conversions of nominal Catholics and the coming to full Catholic faith by non-Catholics. They felt compelled to defend the risen Jesus’ Great Commandment to his apostles in Matthew 28, to go into the world and proclaim the Good News.
Then, papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, in a piece published after World Youth Day in Commonweal (August 11, 2023), took time at the end of his piece to charge Bishop Barron with confusing “evangelization” with “proselytism”—a charge that aimed to hurt, given that Bishop Barron has devoted his life to evangelizing. Proselytism means pressuring people to convert, by contrast to evangelization, which consists in the arduous work of presenting to people the beauty, goodness, and truth of the Gospel and thereby opening the way for the living Christ, through his Spirit, to draw people to himself. Ivereigh’s charge of proselytism was absurd, and Bishop Barron has published a brief but trenchant response.
Ivereigh’s piece is one instance of the current debate among Catholics about what “evangelization” and “encounter with Jesus Christ” actually mean. Although the debate is not a simple one, there are essentially two perspectives, only one of which can be correct. One perspective—Ivereigh’s—is rooted in Christian religious liberalism, while the other perspective is rooted in Ressourcement theology and in the Catholic tradition from the patristic and medieval eras onward.
The rise of liberal Christian thought
To understand this, we need to move backward in time.
Since the fifteenth century, the Church’s theologians have oscillated between two modes of accessing the sources of faith: Renaissance humanist and scholastic. The scholastic mode probes with philosophical rigor to clarify the understanding of the realities of faith, for instance, the causality of the sacraments, what is meant by “grace,” the relationship of Christ’s suffering to his love in the redemptive power of the Cross, the meaning of the Council of Trent’s teachings about the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass, and so on. Scholastic theologians have never been a monolithic block. There have been Jesuit scholastics, Dominican scholastics, Franciscan scholastics, Carmelite scholastics, and many others—all of whom have characteristically differing perspectives.
For its part, the humanistic mode, as found for instance in the nineteenth-century Tübingen School, seeks to understand the sources in their historical context and to apply the new historical learning to understanding the realities of faith. This means appreciating more fully the process of doctrinal development, the nuances of biblical inspiration and biblical genres, the relationship between Scripture and Tradition in communicating divine revelation, the background to the divisions that have wounded the Church (whether the Reformation or the earlier separation of East and West), and so on. It was possible to be both scholastic and humanistic: Cardinal Cajetan spent the first half of his life writing a scholastic commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, and the second half of his life writing biblical commentaries drawing upon humanistic learning in an effort to respond to the Reformation.
In the eighteenth century, however, something new arose to compete with the scholastic-humanistic divide. Christianity itself came to be seen in a new way by a number of thinkers. By the time of Edward Gibbon, it was commonplace among a fairly wide stream of thinkers to hold that doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity had been invented—beginning with the Gospel of John—in order to meet the needs of spreading the Gospel to the Graeco-Roman world. On this view, the Jewish Jesus had simply been a man who proclaimed the kingdom of God, but the first Christians later deified him in order to evangelize the Graeco-Roman world, where humans (such as the Caesars) were regularly exalted to divine status. Naturally, Gibbon also cast doubt on the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection, suggesting that the narratives in the New Testament contradict each other and make no sense other than to theologians.
These doubts, arising from humanistic study, caught fire and produced something new in late-eighteenth century Germany—followed in its own way by England. In lectures and books, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher defended the truth of Christianity not on the grounds of an objectively real Incarnation, Resurrection, or Trinity—all of which he cast doubt upon—but upon Jesus’s uniquely powerful God-consciousness or feeling of absolute dependence. The young Schleiermacher, son of a conservative pastor, had been attacked by doubts owing to the new learning represented by Gibbon and David Hume, and fueled in Germany by continental historians and Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. He resolved his qualms by discovering a new way to understand Christianity, a way that became known as “liberal Protestantism” (liberal was not at this time an epithet). He reconceived the Christian Church as a community stemming from Jesus’ decisive impulse, Jesus’ unique “God-consciousness,” his charismatic feeling of absolute dependence.
For Schleiermacher and those who followed him, no other religious founder and no other religion has ever gestured in such a pure way toward the infinite mystery of the divine. On this view, Jesus cast off all that was traditionally Jewish—and all that smacked of dogma, priesthood, authority, and cult—and he exhibited a pure religion of reason. Liberal Christianity grants that all religious people and all religions are reaching out toward the divine; where Christianity is unique is that Jesus did so paradigmatically.
To Schleiermacher’s insight, further Hegelian thinkers added the dimension of economic and political uplift, often in a socialist direction. By the turn of the twentieth century, the great liberal Protestant thinker Ernst Troeltsch had put into action a plan to turn the Christian churches away from a focus on the Incarnation, the Trinity, and salvation from sin and death (none of which was persuasive to Troeltsch) and toward social action to establish a kingdom of economic and political justice in Germany and throughout Europe.
Christianity had always been interested in caring for the poor and in worshipping God. What was new in liberal Christian thought was the idea that Christianity really was not about things such as the Incarnation, Trinity, whether Jesus rose from the dead, the special chosenness of the Jewish people and so on. None of these things could persuasively be defended anymore, and, besides, even if one continued to believe them (as one was free to do), they were not primary. Instead, for liberal Christians, Christianity is fundamentally about two things: gesturing toward the divine (along with all other religions, who in their own ways gesture toward the divine) and building up authentic community rooted in economic and political justice and equality. In the nineteenth century, this perspective was summed up as the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. This gendered language would no longer be accepted today, but the same basic idea is still current.
Ressourcement theology and Second Vatican Council
Religious liberalism in a Catholic form was expressed eloquently at the turn of the twentieth century by George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy. Their efforts were popular with the younger clergy in France and Germany but were condemned by Pope Pius X, who implemented what can fairly be called a crackdown. A generation of thinkers were trained in Thomism in part to help defend the Church’s teaching about the objective reality of God, Jesus Christ, the sacraments and so on—for the purpose of stemming the spread of religious liberalism. That generation, today identified as “neo-scholastic,” trained a younger generation who sought to engage religiously liberal ideas by going deeper into the sources of Scripture and Tradition, and showing through historically nuanced and erudite arguments that religious liberalism was a mistake.
This generation, today called Ressourcement, agreed with liberal Christians about some things, for instance that the Bible involved a complex set of genres and that things like Noah’s flood over the entire earth did not actually happen. But they disagreed with liberal Christians’ focus on vague gesturing toward the divine, which they diagnosed as religious indifferentism, insensitive to the radically personal inbreaking of the living God among his people Israel and preeminently in Jesus Christ. Although the Ressourcement theologians were generally center-left in their politics, they also disagreed with liberal Christians about whether the meaning of the Gospel is economic and political uplift.
One sees this in Jean Daniélou’s writings from the 1950s, where he is opposing an early but already sophisticated version of liberation theology grounded in the popularity of socialism in postwar France. Daniélou’s point is that the salvation from sin and death brought by Jesus Christ—and the inauguration of his kingdom—differs radically from a mere movement to build up this-worldly economic and politically equality.
Daniélou belonged to the Ressourcement school of theology. He was active in the Council and rejoiced in its teachings, but after the Council he was surprised or even shocked. Pope Paul VI, too, was surprised by the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. Even as an archbishop and Cardinal, and certainly as Pope, Paul VI was a firm friend to the Ressourcement school. But the rise of Catholic religious liberalism surprised and (especially after the response to Humanae Vitae) disheartened him, although he sought to take from it what was good—building upon earlier papal social teaching—in his encyclical on social development, Populorum Progressio.
By the early 1970s, the Church was in a rather chaotic state of change and fervor for more change. The Catholic Church had utterly collapsed as a significant institution in Europe and Quebec. In the United States and Latin America, too, there were large numbers of people leaving the faith, priests leaving the priesthood, and consecrated religious renouncing their vows. Young clergy in the United States marched against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights, and sought a changed Church. In Latin America, young clergy supporting socialist-inspired revolution were leading the charge for the economic and political overthrow of the right-wing rulers—many of whom had been tacitly supported by the older generation of clergy. Joined by laypeople, the young clergy formed “base communities” aimed at stimulating an equitable economic and political life.
Meantime, back in Europe, Archbishop Lefebvre had declared that the Council had fallen into heresy, and he had begun the process that would lead to the juridical separation from the Catholic Church of his communities of Traditionalists.
Catholic liberalism and the “open Church”
In theology after the Council, the “neo-scholastic” generation faded away and vanished. The previously cutting-edge Ressourcement thinkers suddenly became outdated. Catholic religious liberalism exploded. By the early 1970s, it was like a jet had been turned on, and out streamed books with titles such as The Remaking of the Church, endorsed by powerful Cardinals and calling for major reforms, going far beyond the texts of the Council.
These reforms were based on a sense that the Church was outdated and had fallen behind the world. They argued that the Church had to change radically in order to be able to speak to modern man and to share in the progressive developments of the modern era. No longer focused on defending dogmatic formulas, the renewed Church should open its ministry to women, allow for full intercommunion with non-Catholic Christians, replace hierarchical structures with democratic ones, embrace the new morality of the Sexual Revolution, support the world’s struggle for economic and ecological justice, and so on.
The best and most succinct theological statement of this religiously liberal Catholicism is Karl Rahner’s short 1972 book, titled in English The Shape of the Church to Come and written as a programmatic text for the then-ongoing German Synod. Seminarians from 1967 through 1992 basically read nothing other than theology by Rahner or in the vein of Rahner.
In The Shape of the Church to Come, Rahner dismisses much of the Church’s sexual morality as outdated due to the evolving historical character of human nature. He suggests that many doctrines that preconciliar Catholics supposed to have been dogmatically and definitively taught can be discarded, since we now know that John Henry Newman’s understanding of doctrinal development was too conservative. Rahner leaves open such questions as whether it is necessary to be ordained in order to consecrate the Eucharist. He advocates for women priests, for a far more democratically structured Church, and for a Church that no longer focuses upon doctrinal agreement (or “orthodoxy”) among believers.
In his view, the Church should turn its focus toward contributing to political and economic justice. He urges a broader understanding of “God” and “Jesus,” away from the earlier emphasis on dogmatic points and divisions, and now emphasizing instead on a person’s existential stance—that is, whether one is open broadly to hope and love in the deepest orientation of one’s conscience. The sacraments simply remind believers of what all humans already are, namely, persons loved by God. Rahner looks forward to intercommunion with other Christians, and he proposes that even now Catholics should unite with other Christian churches in a new umbrella Church, bringing together all who believe in Christ as God and Redeemer, and allowing each church to retain its distinctives but not to enforce these distinctives upon the other Christians. He does not deny that some things can be “heresies,” false paths for the Church. He simply thinks that these need to be re-thought, so that the Church to come can focus on what it truly important and can live as an “open Church.”
By now, it should be clear that the “open Church” of liberal Catholicism involves a new understanding of evangelization. Ressourcement theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Daniélou, Louis Bouyer, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and others—like their predecessors—understood evangelization to involve bringing a person to confess Jesus Christ as the incarnate Lord and to share in the life of the Trinity through the power of the sacraments, enlightened by the Church’s teaching of faith and morality so as to be sanctified and strengthened for self-sacrificial service.
By contrast, from the perspective of religiously liberal Catholicism, evangelization is focused on two things: sharing together in gesturing toward the mystery of the divine, and building up economic, political, and ecological justice in the world. From Rahner’s perspective, in the world we encounter many “anonymous Christians” who, whatever their religion may be, join with Catholics in bearing witness to the mystery of being and in building up a sustainable and equitable world. On this liberal Catholic view, evangelization succeeds—Jesus Christ succeeds—wherever people join together, without focusing on dogma, cult, or divisions, to give praise to the mystery of existence and to build up justice.
Ivereigh and World Youth Day 2023
The above helps to explain the way that Ivereigh describes the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon, which, despite lower attendance than many earlier World Youth Days, he views as a breakthrough for evangelization. Ivereigh argues that the Lisbon World Youth Day aimed to “present itself as a school of fraternity and synodality, where the ‘culture of encounter’ could take concrete shape in a global get-together centered on the experience of God’s mercy and tenderness”—all for the purpose of “creating a ‘Generation Lisbon’ to build a better future for the Church and the world.” Ivereigh holds that this World Youth Day distinctively focused on the following four things. He explains,
While outwardly this WYD appeared to follow the by-now familiar format, it had some unique characteristics reflecting this pope’s priorities. These can be summarized in four words: ecological, synodal, digital, and fraternal.
Ivereigh devotes three lengthy paragraphs to how the World Youth Day contributed to ecological responsibility, with carbon offsets (especially by planting trees prior to flying to Lisbon), recycling, using reusable water bottles, and focus on climate change as a central part of the Stations of the Cross. Ivereigh notes that rather than hearing from the bishops, the young people taught the bishops:
At the so-called ‘Rise-Ups,’ more than four hundred bishops from around the world heard from young people about the questions that arose from their pre-WYD dialogues on the topics of integral ecology, social friendship, and the mercy of God.
The Portuguese Jesuits, reports Ivereigh, organized a “worldwide consultation with young people about their concerns,” and it turned out that their concerns were about social justice: the issues of “mental health, loneliness, violence and fear, the ecological crisis, the dignity of work and workers, youth unemployment, the seductions of social media, and abusive and addictive behaviors of all stripes.”
In answer to such concerns, according to Ivereigh, the World Youth Day focused on two things: displaying the Church’s concern for building up a more ecologically and economically and socially just world, and showing that the Church is in harmony with all who seek to lift up the mystery of being. (These two things should be familiar by now.) The Church is “a Church without borders,” and everyone is included in the Church—everyone means everyone, not simply people who believe certain doctrines or who seek to obey certain moral teachings, but really everyone, including all who have felt estranged from the Church. Everyone who is committed to building a just world and to experiencing the divine has a place at World Youth Day, since these two things are the key to encountering what Christians call “the mercy of Christ.” Focusing on this new vision will be “crucial to the Church’s capacity to negotiate this ‘change of era’ in which structures built to resist modernity must be renewed and replaced by others that respond to the Galilee of our day.”
I am not saying that religiously liberal Catholicism (or religiously liberal Protestantism) lacks a place for Jesus. Schleiermacher spoke constantly about Jesus, whom he considered a unique exemplar of true religious consciousness, filled with devotion and mercy, and never focused upon cult, law, and purity, unlike (so thought Schleiermacher) his fellow Jews. Ivereigh devotes one paragraph to talking about Jesus, praising Pope Francis’s Christocentrism.
He follows up this paragraph with a description of the open Church, joyfully including non-Catholics in Eucharistic communion and in “an opportunity for Reconciliation, either in the form of sacramental confession or a non-sacramental sharing with experienced couples.” Unity in worshipping the divine (whether Christ is really present in the Eucharist is neither here nor there for such unity, nor is, necessarily, whether sin has really been forgiven, since mercy reigns) and unity in social justice are what matters. Evangelization has succeeded when these are present.
Bishop Barron and Ressourcement Catholicism
Obviously, Bishop Barron takes a different view of evangelization. I try to describe his view in my book The Theology of Robert Barron, so I won’t rehearse it fully here. Suffice it to say that his view (which is no less interested in mercy and social justice) coheres with that of the Ressourcement school and the Catholic tradition: namely, evangelization leads to confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, to sacramental forgiveness of sins and Eucharistic communion, to sharing in the life of the Trinity as a member of the Catholic Church, striving for holiness through the grace of the Holy Spirit.
When Barron was a high school senior in 1977, the future of the Church was up in the air; his generation of young people learned very little about the faith, since the teachers did not know what to teach, despite Pope Paul VI’s best efforts. With the election of Karol Wojtyła, who took the name John Paul II, in 1978, things began to change. As a young bishop during the Council, Wojtyła had been friendly with de Lubac, and he worked to promote the Ressourcement vision that is present in the documents of Vatican II. Like Pope Paul VI and the Catholic tradition before him, Pope John Paul II held to the Ressourcement vision that evangelization involves sharing the Good News that the divine Son has become incarnate in Jesus Christ to redeem us from slavery to sin and death, as expressed in John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis. The wonder of the Incarnation requires to be understood in light of the Creator God’s relationship with his people Israel, since “Christ” means “Messiah.” The wonder of the Incarnation entails ontological realism about the Trinity, the saving Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, and the transformative power of sacraments. John Paul II believed that the religiously liberal path obscures the deepest and most important realities that the Church has to offer, preeminently the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness, grounded in salvation from sin and death through the incarnate Son’s death and Resurrection, a salvation mediated by the Church’s holy sacraments and holy teaching, including its challenging moral teaching.
Although Barron was educated as a seminarian almost solely in the works of Rahner—alongside the texts of the great liberal Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, famous for his gesturing toward the Ground of Being—he gravitated toward the Thomistic theology of God that he received during his philosophy M.A. studies at Catholic University of America. He then did his doctoral work in Paris under a disciple of de Lubac, the French Jesuit theologian Michel Corbin. By the time he returned home to teach at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary in 1992, he had begun to read Balthasar. By this time, he was also being inspired by the pontificate of John Paul II and the beautiful teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Barron knows the world of the nones better than any of his critics, few of whom have been noted for spreading the Gospel in any significant way. Barron is also aware of an important fact that those who promote liberal Catholicism rarely mention. Namely, religiously liberal Protestantism has existed in Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand for well over a century. Many denominations have followed exactly the evangelizing program that Ivereigh celebrates. These denominations have not grown or borne an abundance of spiritual fruits. On the contrary, they have shrunk into almost nothing, and they have become mere cultural rubber-stamps.
The intellectually serious character of Barron’s theology is in evidence in my book, which focuses on six characteristic elements of his work: evangelization, theocentrism, Christocentrism, the Catholic tradition, the moral life, and the spiritual life. Beginning in the 1980s, Barron probed deeply into the divide between Ressourcement Catholicism and religiously liberal Catholicism. Eschewing mere dichotomies, Barron drew insights from leading religiously liberal Catholic thinkers, even while also differing from them—including Andrew Greeley, Timothy O’Connell, Raymond Brown, and Richard Rohr. He sought ways to present dogmatic and moral truths that would make contact with what he found to be the important and valuable emphasis upon religious experience and social justice.
Far from fearing the world, Barron joyfully attended to non-Catholic and non-Christian culture, learning a great deal from it and showing how movies and television shows often offer pointers toward riches that can be found in Catholicism. Barron also digs deep into the philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato, and into the greatest Catholic thinkers, artists, writers, and saints such as Aquinas, Dante, Newman, Thérèse of Lisieux, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor and so on. He draws ecumenically upon George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, and other giants of the American Protestant theological scene. His presentations to Google and Facebook employees, delivered while he was auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, are models of seeking shared ground. He addresses the issues of religious violence and clerical abuse head-on, without defensiveness or concealment. He invites a conversation about religious discourse, about how we gain knowledge about reality, and about what makes us happy.
My hope is that more people will read Barron’s work and see what he is trying to offer on the world stage. The Ressourcement vision of evangelization, which stands in continuity with the Catholic theological tradition (including scholasticisms of various kinds), holds to a Gospel-centered perspective that is found wherever Christianity is growing. Wherever Christianity is shrinking, there the liberal Christian vision of evangelization predominates.
People do not need Jesus in order to have a sense of the divine or a commitment to societal and global equity. Non-Christians, as the nones have realized, can proceed without Jesus. For Christians, though, Jesus is no mere add-on prompting us to do what we would already be doing. Jesus inaugurates the kingdom of God unlike any worldly kingdom; Jesus reveals the Trinitarian life of God; Jesus enables us to see the co-inherence of all creation; Jesus conquers sin and death by his Cross and Resurrection; Jesus invites us sacramentally into his life; Jesus calls us to a cruciform mode of self-sacrificial love, united with the communion of saints; Jesus supernaturalizes the virtues so that we can live with a prudence, justice, courage, and temperance that go beyond any merely human calculus.
Let us, with Bishop Barron, give this Jesus priority.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Why be accountable to the Magisterium and the Mystical Body of Christ, when you can invoke the Rahner’s Spiritus Mundi and “inveigh” (or Iverveigh) against Ressourcement and just make stuff up?
Synodality’s Aggiornamento, butt without Ressourcement? Would such an ideology of Synod-ism be an ecclesial mutation–the institutional analogy for indiscriminate and welcoming group sex?
Today’s synoodalizing church “leaders” have no understanding of what it means to evangelize. They’re playing bridge. Those we seek to evangelize are playing tackle football. Young people’s “gestures toward the divine” more often than not consist of sneers, expressions of disgust and indifference, and all too often vigorously upraised middle fingers. These are not people who will be impressed by synoodalizing nonsense and deferential honor given to Pachamama.
Those engaging in evangelization in the ressourcement tradition have it right. Will ressourcement evangelization convert legions of pagans overnight? No. Indeed, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity Himself didn’t have a perfect batting record in evangelizing (through no fault of His own, of course), so we shouldn’t hope for that ourselves. But the approach of Bishop Barron and others, appealing to beauty and intellect, is how to engage the mind and heart of those most in need of God’s mercy. This is the approach that will bear the most fruit.
Either Bishop Barton or AI (artificial intelligence;) could have recently said this:
“In 200-300 years, Francis will be remembered as a great pope of the merciful Christ who accompanied sinners.”
There is a third vision of evangelization: Saints.
Quoting saints is not the same thing as imitating them.
A “backbencher” is a politician. That is no way to refer to oneself as a successor of the Apostles! Sure, Bishop Baron does not want to get Puerto Ricoed like Bishop Strickland. What of it? Praying Bishop Barron follows Christ at the Synod and not the crowd.
RE: Iverveigh…I’m not interested in hearing from the protestant wing of the Catholic Church.
Our good brother Peter Beaulieu was being sarcastic.
On the subject of Rahner, he was recommended to me when I was in my final year of my conversion process since my friends were convinced I would appreciate deep theology since I had studied deep science. Instead, I was reacquainted with the sort of arrogance that delayed my conversion in the first place. The only ‘brilliance” I ever found in him was his awareness that to make all his theological parts fit together he had to concoct the notion that human nature changes over time, thus, his theology is essentially dependent on a profound stupidity.
The question is then “Where do we go from here?” Do we aspire to conform to God to become the adopted Children of God, members of the Faithful Remnant to hear the words “Welcome my good and faithful servant” or not by conforming God to the world in our best self interests. Have we chosen the narrow staircase to heaven or superhighway to hell? St Thomas Aquinas reminds us that the greatest kindness is to lead one from error to the (objective) Truth (without subjectivity). That is to proclaim the Objective Truthfulness, the moderate realism of the Scholastics, to pick up our cross and follow Him the balance is speculative theology and promotion of error. The stumbling block is many, certainly too many of us were raised in the sentimentalist Liberation Theology since the 50s which few is any current priests and Bishop have the knowledge nor desire to remedy.
Great essay Matthew!! Thanks so much for this. So spot-on.
Ivereigh is far more interested in papal sycophantism than evangelization. The souffle “evangelization” on offer from that school of thought (don’t press too hard or all the air will go out and collapse the little that’s there) will not do the hard work evangelization demands.
Evangelization is a dangerous enterprise as it could get you killed.
This debate goes on in Protestantism as well. Some practice the in your face, buttonholing a person trying to scare the hell out of them. They use a memorized formula to get them on their knees to accept Christ as Savior. I know people who have complied merely to get rid of the obnoxious proselytizer. Everyone needs to be converted, but no two conversations are the same. We can’t convert anyone and must allow the Holy Spirit to work in us. We must live the faith in order to share it. We must be willing to pray for others and to be persistent in this prayer. We must understand people where they are and help them to see where they could be in Christ. If we don’t have joy ourselves we can’t pass it on.while we are all called to evangelize we each do it in different ways to different people. There is no one way or right way.
Among the problems at work is what Fr. Robert Imbelli has cited (his article “No Decapitated Body” in the journal Nova et Vetera, in summer of 2020 if I recall correctly?) as the intentional apostasy inside the Church, admitting reluctantly that it is not merely widespread, but “quite intentional.”
It seems to me that if any man, even a priest or bishop or Cardinal (including one elected as a Pontiff), who publicly denies the miracles of Jesus, including the bodily resurrection of Jesus, is a publicly known apostate.
One such apostate man, who has published his apostasy (the most prominent example being his 1974 book “Jesus the Christ,” re-issued in 2011, is Cardinal Walter Kasper.
It is reasonable to conclude that since Walter Kasper was allowed to continue as a priest despite his apostasy, and was in fact subsequently promoted to bishop and then Cardinal, that the Church establishment is proposing, and in fact insisting, that apostasy is a legitimate form of Catholic and Christian faith.
And it is reasonable to conclude that Walter Kasper is among the leading examples of what Professor Levering refers to as “liberal Catholicism.”
I believe that the fundamental problem is that what the debate involves is not between two legitimate forms of Catholic faith, but a debate between the apostolic faith and apostasy.
What is proposed by Cardinal Kasper is neither Catholic nor Christian.
What they propose can be stated in a replacement of the “Nicean Creed,” with a contemporary “apostate creed” given clarity by the very words (upper case) of their luminary Walter Kasper: “…I believe…he suffered, died and was buried. On the third day HE OBTRUDED IN THE SPIRIT….”
Those words in upper case are Kasper’s very own, from his book I cited above. And they are taught in “Catholic” universities and “Catholic” seminaries around the world, which use Kasper’s book of apostasy “Jesus the Christ.”
In sum, this is not simply to be framed as different approaches to Christianity.
This is apostasy versus Christianity.
Absolutely! These bishops and cardinals might have been hoodwinked by modernist biblical scholars and theologians and intellectuals who have been undermining confidence in the historicity of the Gospels since the 18th century. There is more evidence for the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus than any event in classical antiquity. Most of the beliefs, values, and ideas of these “liberal” Catholic clergy and intellectuals are grounded in a faulty understanding of the social sciences which confuses the correct understanding of value, meaning, and knowledge. What they call knowledge about the modern world is an epistemological-methodological construct which is certainly not grounded in divine revelation, but in the so-called wisdom of man. What is happening is a displacing the Word of God clearly taught in Holy Scripture with the words of men and women, especially in their teaching on human sexuality, marriage and the family. They will ultimately fail, but many will suffer from their false teachings.
While I have enormous respect for both Bishop Barron and Dr Levering, I am not comfortable with the supposition that evangelisation must be either liberal or Ressourcement forms of Catholicism. Whenever there are appeals to “modern man,” especially his sophisticated, enlightened status, I think of the viciousness of recent centuries and the depraved—near feral—mindset we see all around us, with need for bread and circuses of an unprecedented scope to keep the masses from rioting (and they seem to be perpetually raging about something—or at least deeply unhappy).
Gentle, wheedling tones that appeal to man’s cleverness or the uniqueness of contemporary challenges feed the smugness of our age, which is every bit as awash in grave sin as any before it, despite its moral posturing. I honestly don’t have answers, nor the status of a popular globe-trotting prelate. I pray for his success, but we must agree that any success he has is actually due to the prayers and sacrifices of humble Catholics who acknowledge their littleness, and weep for their brethren who have traded their dignity for a mess of pottage.
This is brilliant. I could only hope that CWR would invite you to compose a piece on some matter germane to the Catholic experience.
Ivereigh is no match for Barron. Not even close.
At the time of Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI likely expected protest, although he didn’t expect protest as in protestant.
Karl Rahner’s influential [especially in Germany and the German Synod] theory of religious self realization [see The dynamic in the church, Das Dynamische in der kirche opens the gateway to change independent of Apostolic tradition. Synodality is the obvious vehicle to realize the radical change this papacy believes necessary for an all inclusive evangelization. Now increasingly apparent with prefect designate DDF Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez’ transformation of magisterial authority as revelatory rather than affirming of existing revelation. Ivereigh’s position contrary to Barron’s Ressourcement.
Whether Pope Francis modifies Fernandez’ proposal, which is the likely pattern of ambiguity and implementation expected to follow. Consequently, it is a seeming, though in reality well managed, independent process of Synodal transformation of the Church. Since it’s highly unlikely that it will be supplemented by formal pronouncement, except in the case of ambiguous wording as with the death penalty and the term ‘inadmissible’, which suggests admissibility. What is clear is that we’re not obliged to adhere to what the Synod proposes. Although the damage of suggestion and compliance by the faithful is the danger. Our task as clergy is to make these dynamics apparent.
“The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation [!] before the glorious manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ (cf 1 Tim 6:14, Tit. 2:13)” (Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, n.4).
A “revelatory” synod? Another conflation…if private revelation remains private, and if there can be no further public revelation, what about a collective private revelation? If the Mormons and Muslims can have ongoing revelation, then in the cause of religious “pluralism,” why not baptize process theology?
Only the “backwardists” would object. They and the real Holy Spirit! “…do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).
And I should add the task of capable laymen as you give example here.
Thank you -in helping ordinary Catholics to have bit more grasp about the events , the names , its implications and concerns as they pertain to these times – of battle against family and marriage .The role of carnal passions , the fear /resentment that Church has not done enough in the area may be one factor – just as Adam could have been guarding and tilling The Garden, in thanking, praising The Father , with ever greater unity in the Holy Spirit in the Divine Will , to have helped Eve to know that she is already in the image and likeness of God , to have been led to the Tree of Life and also for the joy of bringing forth holy children in a non carnal mystical manner – as has been the Immaculate Conception ..Bl.Mother filled with such graces as to have seen and loved each of us from that moment on ..graces of same meant to be shared with each of us, as one means of undoing the carnal kingdoms –
://danieloconnor.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/the-blessed-virgin-mary-in-the-kingdom-of-the-divine-will.
‘What you did to the least ..’ the error of seeing the leastness only as material poverty also possibly related to the idolatry of the carnal gods , instead of seeing how being in the prison of bitterness and lusts and all can be much worse , that The Church in sharing The Truth of the Father’s Love and holiness as revealed in The Lord, who shares with His children the banquet of life giving Sacraments and the role of The Mother in healing deep wounds , when one often enough consecrates persons and occasions again and again to that Mother …thanking The Lord with her for the mercy of being forgiven the 10,000 talent debts of receiving the Euacharist without much love and gratitude..leading to the hardening of hearts as well …and our good Lord giving a remedy even there – as offering up the tears of The Lord and The Mother to undo the hardness ..
The decision of the Holy Father to call The Synod , to also recognise gratefully the working of The Spirit ‘in every time and place ‘ – not to condone the presence of the evil spirit , instead rather like the sword of Jehoshaphat, to drive out what need to be, in thanking and praising The Father with all , in all ..
Blessings !
A very interesting and deep article, most of which I do not feel competent to comment on.
I will just make two comments.
Pope Francis, and thus Ivereigh, distinguish between evangelization and proselytism – the first being good and the second bad. My dictionary definitions of both are so similar to be almost identical. It seems as if they are trying to say that actively trying to convert someone is bad, but passively is good.
I would like to know what insights Bishop Barron received from Greeley, Brown and Rohr. Not really a fan of any of the three.
I cannot speak for Bishop Barron, of course, but I’ve personally benefited a bit from reading some Greeley’s sociological work “back in the day” (he was excellent at it), and have used Brown’s two-volume commentary on the Gospel of John on several occasions (teaching classes, writing columns). Brown is limited (he apparently didn’t know of the existence of the Church fathers–ha!), but he is very good on certain things, including etymology of words, historical context, etc. His commentary on John 6, for example, is quite impressive in many ways.
Rohr…well, no. Not a fan, at all.
Mr. Olsen, I get your point. It has been so long since I read anything by Greeley or Brown, that I no longer remember what I may have gotten from them. But merely as a hypothetical question, if someone writes something that is 90% true and 10% false, is it worthwhile to risk being “contaminated” by the 10%?
The article states that most of Bishop Barrron’s seminary studies included Rahner. There were probably some good things in Rahner, but overall would it have been best to skip him? That is my question, (and that relates to my comment on Greely and Brown) and I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
There are certain authors—say, Newman, Ratzinger, Augustine, Danielou, Dawson (just to a name a few)—who I trust implicitly and whose corpus is, I think, strong from top to bottom. Others, like Greeley and Brown, I approach with more of a “they are useful here” or “they make a worthwhile point there” perspective; I’m not too interested in their “project” (my term), even while I think it’s important to be aware of it. So, while Brown can be helpful on some specific point of a Greek word or a historical matter, his nearly complete adherence to the historical-critical method is off-putting and, frankly, boring. He has huge holes in his approach and perspective, whereas the afore-mentioned thinkers do not.
I really doubt that Barron had much of a say in what he had to read in his seminary courses. I think, having written two of his Study Guides, that his ability to find truth and goodness in a wide-range of thinkers is a very admirable trait, in part because it requires a deep and wide knowledge of the Faith. And, personally, I often enjoy reading authors whose thinking I often disagree with (atheists! skeptics! etc!) because they both challenge and, ultimately, bolster my faith.
I would not be surprised, either, if Bp. Barron’s required study of Rahner greatly heightened his sense of urgency to defend the faith through a proper evangelization. His “brief but trenchant response” to Ivereigh is quite good.
I think that’s an astute and logical conclusion. I inclined to also think that one reason so many “progressive”/liberal Catholic (especially on social media, but elsewhere, as Ivereigh demonstrates) are irritated by Barron is because he knows their theology and worldview just as well, or even better, than they do. They try to come off as “cutting edge” and “enlightened,” but so much of they are positing and pushing is just warmed over bromides from the 1960s and 1970s. Most of it is simply boring and has no real appeal, except for Trojan Horse-type missions, as the previous couple of Synods have shown.
Thank you for the response.
Thank you, Mr. Olson! WRT to Bp. Barron, if his charism to evangelize is in part made brilliant by his cloudy time under Rahner, then praise God for the splendor of truth and the wonders it produces in us!
To all good readers of CWR:
I used to be a big fan of Bishop Barron until he adopted the way of a theological snake in 2020 that both saddened and angered me at the same time, especially given the harm that may very well have arisen from his would-be apologia that essentially gave permission to either act sinfully or at the very least with considerable imprudence and a lack of simple foresight regarding the potential harm arising from such an action.
Accordingly, while forgiveness is mandated and granted, the level of the betrayal as I see it was so great that I no longer view Bishop Barron without some skepticism and the fear that, despite still doing many good things, a time will come when he will intentionally let the Faithful down yet again.
What is the specific “betrayal” I mention? Before following up as may be needed, perhaps other readers may already have a recollection/good sense of what it was and would like to chime in with their own take on it. Go for it.
Doc,
In the time you mention, Msgr. Pope wrote in response to one of Barron’s videos or podcasts where Barron voiced support for the hope of universal salvation and then mentioned Jesus as offering mankind a “preferred” path (among all religions) to happiness.
The way some ideas were voiced, worded, recorded led to an internet flurry by orthodox and traditional Catholics, seeing Barron as now ‘fence-sitting’ previously more orthodox Catholicism positions. Some saw a turn to Francis and a turn away from We Know Who Is. He lost trust. Brandon Vogt, spokesperson, wrote a piece denying the implications which Barron’s words had evoked among serious devout orthodox Catholics.
Is there more or something other?
Thank you for this valuable, succinct and thought-provoking piece!
Levering does a great job of addressing the concrete understanding of evangelization, and he indicates that this is part of a broader understanding. But two quick points. First, whether one is talking about evangelization or the competing visions about how to engage with the Chinese communists, they are basically manifesting the same reality: either the Church is that which binds humanity together and Jesus is our example of human fraternity or Jesus is the one doing the bonding, and so faith in him is what unites or divides. In the first the ecclesial mission is elevating the horizontal consideration of brotherhood, in the latter its creating brotherhood by the dogged pursuit of the transcendent.
Point two. Are we so sure proselytism in all its forms is wrong? Certainly, forced baptism of individuals on point of death is wrong. But there is another vision that was popular for a millennium: you use economic and political advantages to induce a leader to convert. Even if his conversion is imperfect, it allows the Chirch to then do the real work of evangelization through the social order in a way that was politically impossible beforehand. In other words, if proselytizing is used as a preamble to authentic evangelization, why is this a problem?
Poor Papa, he desperately wants to be an international rock star but he and his rainbow clowns don’t get it. No matter how much promotion, self-importance and self-congratulatory preamble the Vatican spews, the Circus next month will all be so much Vatican marketing for a product that not only challenges reason but the scriptures themself. On the flip-side: I have no idea who this Pharisee Ivereigh is or the platitudes of “Catholic Liberalism”, but I can tell you that as a father of Gen-Z sons that Bishop Barron is definately reaching these kids. Two very fascinating speeches delivered this pass year was to a multi-denominational audience at the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame and the keynote Commencement speech to a largely Protestant audience at Hillsdale College. As a Catholic raised as a Baptis I can testify that these kids want to live in the light of the commandments, love Jesus Christ and desperately want to get past denominational differences to be unified believers once more – I think it’s a beautiful thing.
“Although the debate is not a simple one, there are essentially two perspectives, only one of which can be correct.”
Whether this “debate” might be called “intentional apostasy” (Chris of Maryland), Catholic Christians must know their faith and be prepared to defend it.
Thank you Matthew Levering for your great help in this defense.
St. G:
I am not certain what you intended to mean, but for the sake of clarity:
What I stated is that the “liberal-Catholic” position is that of apostates, led by men such as Walter Kasper, and joined by those like-minded who have publicly endorsed Kasper and his apostasy, which pretends to be what they themselves call a “de-mythologized” Christianity, but which is nothing but a rejection of the divinity of Christ (e.g. the Pontiff Francis, and “His Eminence” Cupich). Indeed, their position distills to what Fr. Robert Imbelli called “the decapitation of the Body of Christ,” and making themselves as “head of the body.”
The debate itself is not apostasy. And I certainly believe that Bishop Barron is a faithful shepherd, unlike say, Kasper.
I am simply saying that the positions in “the debate” are not between two forms of Catholic faith. It is instead between Catholics who believe in the Gospel, and the post-Christian apostates in “Catholic” costume.
When I hear the Pope condemn proselytizing, I usually come away scratching my head. I hardly hear any Catholics evangelizing, let alone proselytizing. Who exactly is he referring to and what behaviors specifically does he use to define it? Unless he can provide greater detail, I must conclude that he’s just creating yet another strawman so he can by inference poke fun at “traditionalists.” I guess when you’re busy hobnobbing with figures like Clinton, Hindus, Imams, and others from the celebrity cult, any mention at all that you’re a Catholic would constitute proselytizing. What a guy.
Dear Fellow Backwardist Deacon,
I believe he may well refer to us orthodox American Catholic backwardists. We evangelize-proselytize, proffering our pharisaic rigidities where we believe they are most needed. Of course we criticize and spout orthodox truth, and so accusations of injustice or wrongdoing are leveled against us, particularly when our words appear directed toward him and his apostastic cronies and assorted pieces who perform sleights of belief and wordplay games, practicing for the Sin-nod-Circus show. Truth hurts, and he means business in correcting us to believe in his doctrine. He himself is the biggest proselytizer, in the end.
-Sincerely, Bubble-wrapped Indietrist
Excellent, indeed.
This enlightening presentation of Matthew Levering is a good chance to put it side by side with the throught and practice of Pope Francis about evangelization and proselytism. At the background of the debate between Austin Ivereigh and Bishop Robert Barron as well as the earlier pronouncement of Cardinal Americo Aguiar at Lisbon WYD is the often misunderstood or distorted papal teaching about this distinction. It is often illogically misunderstood that the Pope supposedly opposes evangelization, convert making, and proclaiming the gospel by collapsing all these efforts into the unsavory proselytism. It is also often distorted among those who regularly disrespectfully and disloyaly smear the Pope and point to this above example as indicative of the Pope having set aside the Church’s mission of evangelization. Even Levering in this essay without explicity saying it but in his flow of thought somehow joins in the bandwagon of radical Pope Francis bashers who imply that the current papacy has given up the primary task of proclaiming the Gospel or making and bringing converts to Christ and the Church. This nonsense should stop. Pope Francis is only strongly criticizing a proselytism that is a distortion of true evangelization: a smarter-than-thou, condescending, overbearing and obnoxious approach that does more harm than good. The Pope has constantly taught the need for evangelization, by contrasting bad proseytism with the Gospel’s “attraction” (that aligns well with Ressourcement theology’s and Bishop Barron’s emphases on the truth, goodness and beauty of the Christian message). Pope Francis has always underlined the “attractive message” of God’s love, mercy, and tenderness. Christians who proclaim this message must in turn project the joy and attractiveness of the Gospel to make converts and bring them to Christ and the Church. It can therefore be called and considered that the Pope’s is not an “evangelization of (distorted) proselytism” but an “evangelization of attraction” of the “Joy of the Gospel” (“Evangelii Gaudium,” his 2013 apostolic exhortation). Note how he contrasts (distorted) proselytism and attraction. Pope Francis teaches that: “Christians have the duty to proclaim the Gospel without excluding anyone. Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but by attraction.” (EG 15).
“… a smarter-than-thou, condescending, overbearing and obnoxious approach that does more harm than good.”
You have summed up Austen Ivereigh’s approach with clarity and pithiness. Bravo.
Dom:
I note your concerns about “disloyalty” to the Pontiff.
The theme of “loyalty” to the Pontiff is very remarkable, seeming to have suddenly emerged in 2013 from formerly “recusant” commentators, upon the election of the Pontiff Francis, after a long period of alternative behavior in the JP2 and B16 years.
The “renewed theme” of “loyalty” sounds much more akin to the mechanics of Marxist politics than to Catholic and Christian faithfulness.
The oddest manifestations are represented by the recent “loyalty oath” pledged by “His Eminence” Cardinal Tagle, who enjoined his flock in the Philippines to declare their “loyalty to Pope Francis forever.”
Odd because one would have thought that such oaths might be reserved to God…alone.
Remarkable how the table suddenly turned upon one evening in March 2013.
Recalling the famous words of Lord Acton of England, that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” it is sobering to reflect that he was referring to the pathology of hyper-papalism.
The concern harkens to the recent warning by Fr. Robert Imbelli, in his essay in Nova et Vetera, about “decapitating” the Body of Christ.
Something to ponder, in light of these recent 10 years…
Astute. The mundane parallel was that when x was president, “protest was the highest form of patriotism,” but when y was president, “protest was racist [or name your epithet]”
Within the Church, the stakes are higher, eternal. We are not for Peter, or Paul, or Apollo—but for Christ and His Bride as intended. Headed to Nova et Vetera as you suggest…
Genevieve:
Here’s the link to the Fr. Imbelli essay:
https://stpaulcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/flipbooks/nova-et-vetera-18-3/articles/02-nv-18-3-imbelli/#page=6
The central quote I allude to is on the 6th page, numbered 762 in the Journal.
Well said, Chris.
Chris; Genevieve; Edward: Beware of you gradually sliding into the error of Protestantism. It can evolve surreptitiously without you seriously realizing it. With the vice of pride feeling, “I am more Catholic than the Pope,” it comes in stages: 1) Disrespect and disloyalty to (resistance and rejection of the teaching of) the Pope; then, 2) Sedevacantism; and finally, 3) Schism. In which stage are you in now? Read the Bible in Luke 22:32, where you have the vital assurance given by Jesus himself of “the charism of divine assistance” to Peter and his successors. Read Catechism of the Catholic Church 892, on how this papal charism requires of us Catholics “religious assent.” Read especially the Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church 25: “Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking” (Lumen Gentium 25).
Deacon Dom we’ve heard these arguments before now. It misreads and misrepresents scripture in at least 2 ways -suited to its own program.
I’ll give you one misread.
If the Pope is misled in some way on a secular matter, it would need to be brought to his attention (at the very least). This, strictly speaking, would not be a theological issue amounting just so to defying Scripture and disrespecting the Pope. Should it prove that he is insistent on ignoring some pertinent evidences, then the issue is running in another direction.
Didn’t the Pope say he was going to be wary of casuistry.
Dom:
My best sense is that our “discernments,” both mine and, say, your own, including “discernment” about the faithfulness of Church shepherds, as to whether they be true or false (as Jesus warned us all to beware of false shepherds), are to be exercised in the light of what is faithful to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles (and not, as you may be unintentionally suggesting, or I may be misapprehending, is to be measured in terms of “faithfulness to a particular pontiff,” on that ground that any such man who has been elected as a pontiff is de facto a good shepherd).
As we all profess that the Church holds and teaches the apostolic faith, we all as sheep of the Good Shepherd harken to the voice of the faithful shepherd, and are to beware of the voice of false shepherds.
And as we all profess the apostolic faith, we are already in the position of giving witness that His Eminence Hollerich rejects and subverts the commandments of Jesus and his apostles, and is publicly discerned to be a false shepherd.
Thus we are likewise prudent to be on guard respecting the Pontiff who has selected the patently false shepherd Hollerich to be his mediating agent for the forthcoming “Synod-Walking-Somewhere.”
Now we all have reason to be wary of our shepherds snd Pontiffs, because they have shown themselves to have, at the very least, been seduced by others we all recognize to be false shepherds, as both John Paul II and Francis were (somehow) favorably disposed to the false shepherd Theodore McCarrick.
So we are in a time of understandably high discernment.
And all of this discernment of the faithful, encouraged upon us by Our Lord and his apostles, is founded not on flimsy clericalist ideology that “no one can be more Catholic than the Pope,” but instead, is built on the rock foundation of our faith in Jesus, that “no man, even if he be elected a Pope, can be more Catholic than Christ.”
And in closing, discernment is…for everyone.
Seriously, Deacon Dom. If anyone need worry about a slippery scaly slide into Protestantism, most certainly decidedly neither Chris, Genevieve, nor Ed are on that carnival ride. Your claim needs revision. Perhaps you can take it into the House of Smoke and Mirrors at a carnival near you.
Curiously Deacon omits important sentences in his appeal to LG 25 as argument. Further salient points of LG 25 are capitalized and set off by triple carets below:
25.^^^AMONG THE PRINCIPLE DUTIES OF BISHOPS THE PREACHING OF THE GOSPEL OCCUPIES AN EMINENT PLACE.^^^(39*) For bishops are preachers of the faith, who lead new disciples to Christ, and they are authentic teachers, that is, teachers endowed with the authority of Christ, who ^^^PREACH TO THE PEOPLE COMMITTED TO THEM THE FAITH THEY MUST BELIEVE AND PUT INTO PRACTICE, AND BY THE LIGHT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ILLUSTRATE THAT FAITH.^^^ THEY bring forth from the treasury of Revelation new things and old,(164) making it bear fruit and ^^^VIGILANTLY WARD[ING] OFF ANY ERRORS THAT THREATEN THEIR FLOCK.^^^(165)
Although the individual bishops…proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and ^^^AUTHENTICALLY TEACHING MATTERS OF FAITH AND MORALS, THEY ARE IN AGREEMENT ON ONE POSITION AS DEFINITIVELY TO BE HELD.^^^(40*)
And this infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith and morals, ^^^EXTENDS AS FAR AS THE DEPOSIT OF REVELATION EXTENDS, WHICH MUST BE RELIGIOUSLY GUARDED AND FAITHFULLY EXPOUNDED.^^^ And this is the infallibility which the Roman Pontiff, the head of the college of bishops, enjoys in virtue of his office, when, as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, [he] ^^^CONFIRMS HIS BRETHREN IN THEIR FAITH,^^^
************
In sum, a bishop’s authentic authority to which the faithful owe assent is when the bishops teach together authentic doctrine as Revelation has revealed it.
It is a sin of excess against obedience, a sin of servility, if the faithful adhere to teaching contrary to higher laws, or to divine commands or prohibitions (e.g.,the words of Jesus on the indissolubility of marriage, for example).
Teaching given in the name of Christ but teaching not ^^^OF CHRIST^^^, by its nature opposes Christ. In this case, the faithful retain every right to question their bishops’ use of authority.
Teaching which is contrary to traditional magisterial teaching and to Revelation is either in error or is false. Fraternal charity among prelates would suggest that dubia may justifiably be presented and charitably addressed. Silence may say more than words, and silence sometimes renders other words meaningless if spoken in error or in opposition to Christ.
And yet, with all of the posturing by Francis regarding evangelization/proselytizing, the Catholic Church in the West is losing baptized Catholics by the droves, and among the few who enter the Church through RCIA and other formation programs many eventually leave the Church. So why is Francis getting his panties in a knot about proselytizing vs evangelization? As an anecodote, we were vacationing in Italy last month and had the damnest time trying to find an open church for Sunday Mass.
In reading your analysis, it occurs to me that another distinction might apply:
We read: “[…] the bandwagon of radical Pope Francis bashers who imply that the current papacy has given up the primary task of proclaiming the Gospel or making and bringing converts to Christ and the Church.”
Wondering, here, if there might be a gap between when we hear about “proclaiming the Gospel [of Christ]” and witnessing to the full “Christ of the Gospel?” The former possibly implying a more congregational (synodalized inclusivity?) vision intent on the application of Gospel “values;” with the latter certainly including this, but more clearly centered on the factual and literally incarnational “Christ of the Gospels”–as in radical conversion, as in all of the sacraments, and therefore as in the Eucharistic and Mystical Body of Christ?
What does it mean, fully, to say as you correctly say, to bring “converts to Christ and the Church”?
Next month will go down like a lead balloon! I believe that there is nothing of substance at its core and I hope that the true spirit that is The Holy Spirit will bring calm and a severe dose of reality to a process that has at its heart a “theology” that has been debated and reflected upon the back of an envelope!!
As for the gen z concerns: not a desire about holiness and the call to sanctity, but more about the planet and mental health!!!!! GIVE ME A BREAK¡!!!!!!
Great article Matthew. Based on reason and facts as always! Hope the the liberal readers don’t see this as an attack on them but as a thoughtful reflexión of these two current theological approx to evangelization (regardless who the pope or actors described here).
I enjoy reading your books Matthew.
It’s pretty clear that Ivereigh has the mind of the pope here. There have just been far too many scandalous statements, incidents, and appointments that militate in that direction. Bishop Barron cites PF’s (in private) ad limina statement, but then PF has been shown to speak out of both sides of his mouth, with duplicity, depending on who he is addressing. I have no doubt that PF said what Bishop Barron says he did, but I don’t believe it and neither should he. There is just a mountain of evidence pointing in the other direction. There has also been plenty of opportunity for PF to publicly and forthrightly correct the public’s impression of his take on evangelization but he never does so.
I feel that we need to get our act together or the front door will not open. What’s really happening?
Our Church has become less attractive to teetering Catholics and non-Catholics. More faithful leaving than rejoining. The disparaging comments on Pope Francis. A disgraced priesthood. Women Priests, (poor dogma), closed parishes and schools…
How do we train our evangelical “army”? We may need to offer a PhD in evangelism.
Or, we may take the evangelical Jehovas Witnesses proactive method of knocking on doors. I’m not very good with the attack approach.
Pray hard and get involved!
Evangelization is multi-form. This is how I read VATICAN II and how it speaks to me when I peruse or study it. The Council did not step out and away from the past, what it did was illuminate (a collection – or, some) themes for the age we are in and affirm the mission to witness to Christ.
Then also it does some other things, like say, it 1. touches some incidental issues like amalgamation of communities that are dwindling but respecting charisms and 2. marks out areas needing their own specialized and subsidiary focus like education – where neither is homogenized or globalized.
There is a marked tendency to read the dogmatic sections are a thrust to homogenization and globalization. That is not the meaning of the text nor the intent of the Council nor the way of the Church.
When I look at the real needs for ecumenism, inter-religious dialogue and the witness of the Church in the modern world, what appears to me that the “attacking” of “proselytism” is a thoughtless entry that in the meantime produces a “divide and conquer” modality unworthy of the moment while serving egregious purpose.
Pope Francis then lays stress in secular themes like ecology and migration, as the witness of faith. These may have their merits but the emphasis on them can devolve into proselytism in the real sense of the word!
Thus I would say that the “debate” or dichotomy between Ivereigh and Barron can amount to something like a bear trap where everybody has the solution how to release the animal but is unable to; and no-one can heal the poor thing. They have a very good time of making displays for the whole lifetime of the terrible injured situation.
On any side, the homogenization and globalization “developments” remain deeply suspect.
Holy Father -‘ united to the Lord carry all mankind on his shoulders – 7th day of prayers – https://www.thedivinemercy.org/message/devotions/novena
Many places in the world look to the Holy Father , his words and opinions as indicative of the stance of the Christianity – ignorant of the distortions in mnay quarters .The caution against proselytism does good at multiple levels – to reassure such that The Church is not about earthly power and #s, esp. through use of such allurements or force , as it is in – such an assurance needed to also help free those fall into its habitual blatant , violent ways ..or in hidden ways – against other Christians .. his grieving words against such – as a prayer to the Holy Spirit , to protect the sheep , against the prosylitism through secularism too and those who spread fear and distrust , from far off hidden enclaves to incite concordance of sleeping generational spirits in those who still are not quite solid – even when they thought they were set strong to lead others …and those with much money who can build huge showy structures to also proselytise with a subtle pride , its scorn and contempt – thus , persons falling into idolatry , as with the bronze serpent that had to be destroyed .. Mercy !
To meiron: Thanks for the follow-up regarding what I see as a Betrayal of the Faithful by Bishop Barron.
You write:
Doc,
In the time you mention, Msgr. Pope wrote in response to one of Barron’s videos or podcasts where Barron voiced support for the hope of universal salvation and then mentioned Jesus as offering mankind a “preferred” path (among all religions) to happiness.
The way some ideas were voiced, worded, recorded led to an internet flurry by orthodox and traditional Catholics, seeing Barron as now ‘fence-sitting’ previously more orthodox Catholicism positions. Some saw a turn to Francis and a turn away from We Know Who Is. He lost trust. Brandon Vogt, spokesperson, wrote a piece denying the implications which Barron’s words had evoked among serious devout orthodox Catholics.
Is there more or something other?
Response by Doctor Veritatis:
A fine shot, friend meiron, but the betrayal I write about involves Bishop Barron actually publishing a piece that could have been written by a practiced two-faced Jesuit wherein he provides a bogus rationale for Catholics to vote for Joe Biden because Donald Trump did not exhibit the kind of overall behavior the good Bishop decided should be present. As such, he set forth that Catholics could in good conscience vote for Biden despite his horrible record on abortion and related moral issues simply because Trump ‘was flawed in other ways.’
Totally despicable, and who knows how many Catholics it influenced to vote for Biden since their Catholic consciences were provided bogus information by the popular Bishop. A few months into the Biden administration, and Bishop Barron called him to task for his support and efforts to expand abortion, but what did he honestly expect Biden would do? Moreover, such an expansion of abortion does not occur with Trump still in the White House, so ‘thanks a lot Bishop Barron. You supported Catholics voting for Biden and advised how they could do so in good conscience, and that is all on you and fellow clergy travelers who provided similar cover for Catholics to not properly exercise their moral consciences in the voting booth.’
Barron, of course, did not have to give a full-throated endorsement of Trump (and he could have remained silent) but at the time of the 2020 election, and despite flaws in Trump’s abortion position (made somewhat worse recently), Trump was so much more in line with Catholic teaching on this and other related moral issues (e.g., gender ideology, critical race theory injustice, etc., etc.) that I cannot see it as anything but a great betrayal of the Faithful by Bishop Barron.
And, sadly, this betrayal is why I now look at Bishop Barron with skeptical eyes because he went out of his way to actually help Joe Biden become president, and look at the evil his administration continues to unleash.
Thanks, Doc. I didn’t know but am not surprised.