On disagreeing with bishops

Fr Z reports that a Catholic candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum, has publicly disagreed with the US Conference of bishops, on the subject of immigration. The bishops suggested that, to deal with the huge pool of illegal immigrants already in the United States, they be given the right to stay if they remained in the country for a certain number of years.

“If we develop the program like the Catholic bishops suggested we would be creating a huge magnet for people to come in and break the law some more, we’d be inviting people to cross this border, come into this country and with the expectation that they will be able to stay here permanently,” said Santorum..."

It reminded me of a British politician, John Gummer MP (as he was: he's now Lord Deben), a few years ago. In a speach in the House of Commons in February 2007, he said

"I want to give one example [sc of discrimination] because I happen to disagree with my Church on it, so it is a good example to use. I think that it is right to remove the discrimination against same-sex couples in relation to adoption, but I also think that we should be tolerant of people who do not agree with that."

Gummer had become a Catholic in 1992.

I suppose Tablet-type Catholics would say that they were both entitled to say what they liked, regardless of what their bishops had said on the matter. Left-leaning Catholic liberals (not all liberal Catholics are on the political left) can be surprisingly assertive about the need for other people (not themselves) to obey ecclesiastical pronouncements they happen to like, but this is just tactical. The fundamental view is that if you believe something, it is a matter of conscience; if it is a matter of conscience, then it would wrong for you to act against what you believe. It follows from this facile syllogism that the teaching of the Church should never be followed by anyone on pain of sin, unless by someone who by sheer coincidence happened to agree with it already.

Ultramontanist Catholics would say that both are wrong: the classic proposition of ultramontanism is that the whole gamut of offical teaching is binding on the Catholic, and in both cases we have bishops exercising their teaching office on a matter of public morality, or at least appearing to do so. In each case it is a matter not of doctrine narrowly defined, but of the practical moral implications of doctrine, but if you don't allow bishops (and the Pope) to set out such practical moral implications in an authoritative way then the doctrines will be useless verbal formulae.

A lot of conservative Catholics are attracted by ultramontanism today, in reaction to liberalism. Both positions are mistaken, however. Against liberalism, the point of authoritative teaching is bringing people the light of the Gospel, so that where people once believed the wrong thing, they start believing the right thing. The Church can do this because her teaching is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, and the people are rationally justified in accepting the teaching because they recognise in the Church the voice of Our Lord. In all sorts of ways the Church's authority can be perceived by people of good will: they can see her power to transform lives and make saints, for example; they see supernatural signs accompanying her activity, and they see the intellectual power and coherence of the teaching itself.

Against ultramontanism, the Church distinguishes between binding and non-binding pronouncements with great care, and this distinction is part of her teaching: to ignore it in order to adhere to that teaching more closely is self-defeating. On matters of historical or scientific fact not directly connected with the deposit of Faith, the Church exercises extreme caution: we are never obliged to believe the truth of private revelations, for example. Again, the moral urgency of a bad situation is for bishops and the Pope to point out: the remedy may be obvious (like feeding some starving people), or it may require complex judgements based on human learning and expertise. In the latter case, it is a matters of prudential judgement, and here there is room for legitimate disagreement.

As Fr Z suggests, however much we may disagree with Santorum on his favoured immigration policy (whatever it is), it is hard to deny that exactly what policy will most help actual and potential immigrants and their hosts is a matter of prudential judgement. Economic and political judgement comes into play. Well-meaning policies can be counter-productive.

Gummer/ Lord Deben is on thinner ice. While there are prudential judgements at issue in placing children with adoptive parents, the idea that is a matter of justice, of non-discrimination, that those in civil partnerships be allowed to adopt, is (as the Bishops of England and Wales had pointed out) incompatible with the obligation of adoption agencies to place children in the best possible family. It is also at right-angles to fundamental Catholic teaching on the nature of the family. Again, the very notion of civil partnerships as a quasi-family unit involves the legal recognition of a sexual relationship incompatible with Natural Law. In speaking as he did, Gummer demonstrated a refusal to be docile to a whole raft of Catholic teachings, not as applied to an individual, tricky, practical case, but in principle.

Blind Obedience: St Ignatius and St Robert Bellamine

'Pray Tell' blog has a story today about a group of Austrian priests promising a campaign of disobedience. It looks like a systematic attempt to undermine the sacramental priesthood, in which they no longer fully believe. They are (as far as one can tell) following their consciences but I have explained before this isn't enough for their actions to be even subjectively right, let alone objectively so. They are blameworthy for failing to conform their consciences to the teaching of the Church.

The conforming of one's mind to an external authority in Catholic teaching is something which has been the source of a rich seam of anti-Catholic polemic by both Reformation and Enlightenment figures. To make matters worse, in addition to talking of 'corpse-like' obedience (which I have already discussed) St Ignatius used the phrase 'blind obedience' and talked about the subjection not only of the will but the intellect to a human superior. If anything is likely to get the enemies of the Faith to resort to the jibe that Catholicism is anti-intellectual, this is surely it.

In fact of course the Church has been the biggest supporter of education and every kind of intellectual endeavour in history. We need to look more closely at what St Ignatius meant, and how he fits into the wider Tradition.

St Ignatius is talking, in his 'Letter on Perfect Obedience', principally about the obedience of a religious - a member of an order who has taken a vow of obedience - to a superior, but he is aware of the wider implications as well. His point is that perfect obedience goes beyond outward conformity: the subject must make his superior's judgement his own, even if the subject would not have come to that judgement on his own. This is, in fact, necessary: only if you have internalised your superior's mind on a subject will you be able to adapt to changing circumstances or deal with unforeseen challenges in a way which advances the object of the exercise. For the situation St Ignatius is addressing is not one in which robotic, outward obedience will do: he has in mind situations in which his Jesuits are given orders, and then dispatched into jungles, or across deserts or oceans, where they will have to exercise considerable initiative and ingenuity with minimal, or no, further communication from headquarters. They must be able to do this while remaining steadfastly committed to an overall strategy which is also being followed by other, equally isolated Jesuits in a different part of the jungle, or in another Catholic safe house somewhere else in England. Perfect obedience in this sense is what makes it possible for isolated operatives to have a high degree of initiative and self-sufficiency without sacrificing coordination, in a hostile environment.

Just like in military situations? Yes, just like in military situations. It is no accident that St Ignatius had been a soldier and that the Jesuits are often described as having military discipline. The point is that officers in the armed forces are not, even ideally, stupid: they have to think on their feet at the same time as not arguing with strategic and tactical decisions made by superiors. If you think about why this is necessary in warfare, you should be able to see why this is necessary for the Church militant as well. As with 'corpse-like obedience', the primary application here is not matters of faith, but practical issues. When matters of faith come in, then the problems start.

And so they did. It so happens that the Letter on Perfect Obedience was quoted against the Jesuits in the time of St Ignatius' successor, and the whole issue was investigated by the Holy See. It was pointed out that if Catholics are taught this notion of obedience then they are likely to follow straying bishops and priests into heresy. The great St Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit himself, addressed this problem as follows:

If the danger in question is to be measured by the obedience of religious, much more should it be measured by the obedience of the simple people, who listen to their pastors or bishops preaching publicly and with all the adjuncta of authority. For although the people take no vow of obedience to their pastors or bishops, they are still bound to obey them according to the teaching of St. Paul. So that, willing or not, they have to render them blind obedience and credence in those things which are not obvious to them already. Of course it can happen that a bishop or priest may be a secret heretic, trying to seduce the people and propagate his heresy. But God Himself and the vigilance of other pastors of souls will not permit this to go on for very long before it is properly referred to the judgment of the Holy See. Moreover, even though somewhere, by God's permission, a credulous people should be easily seduced by their pastor, no Catholic would dare say that therefore the people should be discouraged from obeying their prelates, or should themselves become judges of their pastors, and decide on the doctrine that is being preached to them. We know from present experience among the Lutherans that the danger of heresy is far greater by making this kind of concession to human liberty, than it will ever be from the simple obedience of the people. . . . Consequently, if the ordinary faithful must simply trust their pastors in the things which appertain to God, and render them corresponding obedience and respect, much more should religious obey and be subject to their superiors, perfectly and simply, and in that sense blindly, in whatever does not manifestly contravene the law of God.

This passage, one might say, tells you everything you need to know about the post-Tridentine Church. First, watch out for the caveats: the people 'have to render them blind obedience and credence in those things which are not obvious to them already.' Obedience extends to 'whatever does not manifestly contravene the law of God'. This is not the 'leave your brains by the door' obedience: for all that Bellarmine says the simple Catholic should not 'be the judges of their pastors', they are to judge at least that what these pastors say is in conformity with what they securely know of the faith, what is obvious to them.

But second, the strategy here is not to rely on the education of the simple people to make them more acute judges (to extend the range of what is 'obvious' for them), but to rely on centralisation: appeal to the Holy See. It should not be said that the Counter-Reformation neglected the religious education of the people: on the contrary, never had there been such a mammoth effort of publishing, school-building, and catechising as was put into motion by Trent, above all by the Jesuits. But while vast quantities of sound doctrine were shovelled into the attentive ears of schoolchildren from Tipperary to Shanghai, the culture which emerged seemed to place obedience of thought to superiors above that sensus catholicus which would enable them to withstand a widespread apostacy.

The simple Catholics who resisted the English Reformation despite nearly all the bishops giving way - those who hid the holy images and the old books, and even rose up against the imposition of the Prayer Book - they kept the faith alive in England, and provided a congregation for the Jesuits and other priests when they arrived in England. They did what St Athanasius did, and what good Catholics have always done in resistance to fashionable heresy. But this indomitable spirit was noticably absent in the 1960s and later when Catholics heard teachers and priests teaching faddish rubbish. And, sadly for the Bellarmine strategy, the central authority of the Church had simultaneously ceased to function.

Just one illustrative anecdote. In the dark days following Vatican II Michael Davies heard of a nun giving talks to adults in a parish about the Faith who had taught that there was no real change in the bread and wine at Mass. He joined the audience at the next talk and (not being recognised) asked a question, quoting Pope Paul VI's Mysterium Fidei. The nun was flustered and backtracked. Another audience member stood up indignantly to remind her of what she had said the previous week against transubstantiation.

The point here is that there had been no outcry against this teaching the previous week. The good and well-catechised Catholics present had simply accepted that Vatican II had made some changes and lapped it up. Bellarmine would have been horrified - transubstantiation should have been sufficiently 'obvious'; he had in mind a much more subtle and gradual undermining of the faith by a 'secret heretic'. But these Catholics gave way without a struggle all the same. And thereby hangs a tale.

Pictures: St Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church; bottom, the late Michael Davies. In between, a couple of pieces of crude anti-religious propaganda.

Corpse-like obedience: St Ignatius and St Francis

St Ignatius of Loyola is often quoted as saying that the Jesuits should have 'corpse-like' obedience, to their superiors and of course to the Pope. (He uses the phrase is his Constitutions in 1540.) This is a puzzling simile: why a corpse? The obvious simile for a very strong type of obedience would be that of a slave. But St Ignatius does not say that Jesuits or anyone else should have the attitude of slaves towards human authorities - if he had he would, of course, have been contradicting the tradition of the Church. The authority which corresponds to slavish obedience is tyrannical, and that is not something any religious superior or the Holy Father would ever wish to lay claim to. So what does corpse-like obedience mean? Corpses, one might think, don't make very effective servants.

I have been reading the Life of St Francis by St Bonaventure, and I came across a passage which is highly likely to have been familiar to St Ignatius; it is reasonable to think it is the source of the simile, or at least one source. St Francis' use of the simile is a way of exploring the connection between obedience and humility.

From Bonaventure's Life of St Francis, Ch 6 section 4

When once it was enquired of him what man should be esteemed truly obedient, he set before them as an ensample the similitude of a dead body. "Lift up," saith he, "a dead body, and place it where thou wilt. Thou shalt see it will not murmur at being moved, it will not complain of where it is set, it will not cry out if left there. If it be set in a lofty seat, it will look not up, but down. If it be clad in purple, it but reboubleth its pallor. This (he saith) is the truly obedient man, who reasoneth not why he is moved, who urgeth not that he should be transferred; who, when set in authority, preserveth his wonted humility, and the more he is honoured, considereth himself the more unworthy.'

This is the kind of obedience, of course, of vital interest to religious superiors: that their people go where they are sent and perform the jobs they are told to perform, without complaining. This what St Ignatius was offering to the Papacy: a body of men who would implement his initiatives and address his priorities.

It has not, in fact, got anything to do with assent to truths proposed for belief by the teaching authority of the Church, nor does it shed any light on the problem of 'Indiscreet Obedience' I have discussed elsewhere. It is an important strand in the virtue of obedience, but not the only one.

Are we asking liberals to act against their conscience?

Liberals in the Catholic Church are a sensitive bunch. Not sensitive to others, of course, but to themselves and their friends. If they see another liberal disciplined, they always defend him, even if (like the former Bishop of Toowoomba in Australia) they would hesitate to agree with what he said. Such disciplinings are extremely rare, but acts of Papal authority are becoming a little more forthright under the present Pope (and God be thanked for that), and the liberals have an increasingly long list of things they disagree with which are actually going to be enforced. They are being compelled to accept things which they can't prevent, such as the Anglican Ordinariate and celebrations of the Traditional Mass; they are being asked to do what they do not want to do, such as use the new Missal translation; and they are being told not to say things they want to say, such as that women can be ordained priests.

I have no doubt at all about the sincerity of Catholic liberals, so the question arises whether their refusal to obey - should they refuse - would be morally justifiable. After all, the Church teaches that we should follow our consciences. Actually, this is almost a truism, since your conscience is that faculty which tells you what you are obliged to do: it would be nonsense to say 'you ought to do what you believe you ought not to do'. So if a liberal Catholic thinks it would be wrong not to be as obstructive as possible to those who want a Traditional Mass, to use the new Missal translation, or to remain silent about the ordination of women, what should they, in conscience do? What would it be reasonable for their superiors to punish them for? And in doing what would they be committing a sin?

A full treatment of this would require a book; I'm just going to make a few points. First, a knee-jerk Ultramontanism which says that you should do whatever you are told by a legitimate authority is wrong. This is called 'Indiscreet Obedience' by St Thomas Aquinas and is a serious error. If you are told to commit a sin, you must not do it, nor do you avoid committing a sin yourself by the plea that you were commanded to do it. The command is no defence because even if the person commanding has legitimate authority that authority does not extend to commanding sins. You are no more obliged to obey the Pope if he tells you to commit fornication than you are obliged to obey a car park attendant if he tells you to hang blue curtains in your living room.

Second, Catholic traditionalists do not find knee-jerk Ultramontanism at all attractive, because although we'd all like to see liberal excesses curbed, we can see what damage this 'I was only obeying orders' mentality did to the Church in the 1960s and 1970s. A large percentage of a generation of priests who were brought up on obedience and (apparently) little else wrecked their churches and drove countless souls out of the practice of the Faith by zealous application of ill-considered initiatives deriving from what they took to be legitimage authority. On closer inspection many of the things encouraged by bishops or Diocesan liturgical directors and the like were contrary to authoritative documents from Rome, but these priests didn't see it as their place to question such things. When asked they would often say that it wasn't their idea, they quite liked the old high altar, the Penny Catechism or whatever it was but they had to obey. This was obedience in wilful ignorance of the rightness or real bindingness of the command.

So not only must you not obey what you know to be a sinful command, but you cannot close your eyes to the possibility that it is sinful and hope for the best. Does that mean Catholics, even those with special vows of obedience, should only obey commands they happen to agree with?

That would appear to be the position of many liberals. Documents from Rome which they don't like go into the wastepaper basket regardless of their level of authority, unless they tickle the recipient's fancy. This is the opposite extreme to what I've called knee-jerk Ultramontanism and is also wrong. The correct position depends on an understanding of what authority in the Church is actually for.

Authority in the Church, like authority in the family and the state, is for the promotion of the Common Good. In the Church this is specifically the good of souls. Commands which are contrary to the good of souls have no binding force, because they are failures as commands, in the same way that they would be failures if they were not promulgated, or asked you to do something yesterday, or to breath underwater. This is recognised explicitly in the canon law tradition, which says 'the good of souls is the supreme law'. The Church operates with a Natural Law understanding of law, not a Legal Positivist conception.

Since it is the precise role of people in authority to determine what is for the good of souls in particular concrete circumstances, those commanded don't need to second-guess them all the time. We can give them the benefit of the doubt when commanded to do something we don't fully understand. It is only when it is clearly contrary to the good of souls that this principle comes into play.

Now the liberals may think this gets them off the hook, since they think it is clear enough, but in considering what is for the good of souls we are not starting with a blank piece of paper. Scripture, Tradition, the constant practice of the Church, the Magisterium, the Sacraments: these things teach us what is for the good of souls. Being formed by these things in one's moral understanding is to have a 'formed conscience': the kind of conscience which is not just willfulness, but that we really should obey.

And this is the key to the error of many 'conservative' Catholics who over the years have attacked Traditionalists and said that we are no better than liberals in subjecting Church documents to examination and criticism and not just blindly obeying everything. Because if you have a formed conscience, if you are properly formed in the Church's Tradition, in scripture, in the Magisterium, then you will have more reason to disobey commands (or purported commands) which are contrary to Tradition, Scripture, and the Magisterium, and less reason to disobey commands which protect, advance, and reiterate what is found in Tradition and so on. So far from the Traditionalist and the liberal being parallel in disobedience, they are taking opposite positions.

The liberal may argue that the new Missal translation, for example, is not for the good of souls, and I grant he may really believe that. But look at the arguments and it quickly turns out that what he doesn't like is in many cases simply the accurate rendering of liturgical texts which are deeply embedded in the Church's tradition. Catholics have always (since at least Pope Gelasius) said Christ's blood was shed 'pro multis': to say it is wrong to say it was shed 'for many' is to reject the constant teaching of the Church.* To say that it is not for the good of souls that they be exposed to the teaching of the Church is to cease to be Catholic. (We're not talking here of some situation under persecution where explaining the subtleties would be impossible, where the Church's enemies will seize on some formulation to damage the Church, or anything like that.)

Similarly, when liberals disobey liturgical law, the laws they disobey are attempts to keep them in line with tradition. In using General Absolution, pottery chalices, leaving the sanctuary to give the kiss of peace, etc. ad nauseam, they may think they act for the good of souls but they are rejecting the guidance of the Church herself on what is good for souls - not just the views of the jack-in-office (if there is one) seeking to enforce the petty rule, but the voice of Christ speaking through the Church's immemorial traditions, discipline, and Magisterium.

We are beginning to see more traditionally-minded priests bending some of the rules of the Novus Ordo to make it more traditional. The Holy Father does this from time to time. I won't go into details, but we are talking about minor rubrical issues. Cardinal Burke, the Church's chief legal officer under the Pope, has been criticised for wearing a galero. Are the Holy Father and Cardinal Burke undermining a proper respect for the Church's law? No. Sure, these things are not explicitly permitted in the latest edition of the rule book. But breaking rules in this way is NOT parallel to the liberal breaking of rules, since it is in accord with tradition, not against it. The Church tells us that certain rubrical gestures are helpful to the faithful and pleasing to God: the Church tells us that when we read that they were used by the Church for a millennium or so. If they can be used once more in the Novus Ordo when not explicitly called for in the current rubrics, without causing 'admiratio', well it is not for me to give permission for this kind of thing but I'm not going to complain either. What it is not is a parallel to a liberal priest doing what has been deliberately rejected by the Church for a millennium or so and is still contrary to the rules, because the Church in her wisdom judges it harmful for souls.

The liberal may appeal to conscience, but where does this conscience come from? If the liberal's conscience is not 'formed', it is not Catholic, it is just willfulness. If the liberal's conscience is not Catholic, the Church needs to use her discipline to protect the faithful and perhaps even to convert the liberal.

*In response to criticism my reasoning here is as follows. 'Pro multis' is the teaching of the Church; 'for many' is simply an accurate rendering of that phrase; to reject 'for many' is ipso facto to reject 'pro multis', and therefore to reject the teaching of the Church. The case I have in mind is where, as noted earlier, "it quickly turns out that what he doesn't like is in many cases simply the accurate rendering of liturgical texts". The reasoning of many liberal dissenters appears to be against not so much 'for many' as a translation of 'pro multis' but 'pro multis' itself. I say 'appears' and it is not my purpose to pick out named examples of people who hold the view, but only to ask what someone who did in fact hold such a view would be morally obliged to do about it.