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Post by hibernicus on Jun 13, 2020 21:51:16 GMT
I suspect he is teetering on the edge of something dangerous, and doesn't distinguish sufficiently between good-faith dialogue and unacceptable syncretism - but I also think he has a point. I'm worried that that point will be discredited or overlooked because of his flirtations with the tin-foil hat brigade.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 18, 2020 20:51:17 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 13, 2021 20:48:06 GMT
This article discusses the attempt by the Curia to police church art after WWI, including the condemnation of an expressionist Stations of the Cross by the Flemish artist Albert Servaes in the early 1920s. Some points worth bearing in mind: (1) This decree reflected the increased centralisation of the Church after Vatican I and the codification of Canon Law; nothing like this sort of central intervention had been done before (there were some sporadic interventions after Trent, but they were not concerted). (2) There was a type of officially-favoured figurative kitsch before Vatican II, just as there has been officially-promoted abstract kitsch after it. The second is partly a reaction against the first. (3) An Irish angle not mentioned in the article - John Charles McQuaid's controversial diktats concerning church art were not simple individual lunacy, as John Cooney represents them, but reflected a wider official mentality of the time. (4) Admirers of Bl. Titus Brandsma may note that he defended the controversial Stations and got rapped over the knuckles for it. I suspect his attitude reflected his wider inset in the possibilities of new media. If we are going to invoke the example of Bl.Titus Brandsma we need to take this aspect into consideration. (5) The author's complaint about official centralisation of art policy resembles St John Henry Newman's complaint that the Vatican intervened in theological debates before they had time to develop; and like it is open to the counter-argument that current conditions in terms of mass publicit etc require earlier intervention if the wider public are not to be led astray or tyrannised by local elites. Any thoughts? www.firstthings.com/article/2021/08/when-rome-policed-artEXTRACT The example of Van de Woestijne and other Latem artists such as the sculptor George Minne (beloved as well as ridiculed for his “Gothic soul” and attentiveness to medieval traditions) encouraged Servaes to become more serious about Catholicism. While throwing himself into painting and drawing, he was drawn to the Carmelite spirituality of his new confessor and director, Fr. Jerome of the Mother of God, who taught him about Teresa of Avila and other mystics and introduced him to neo-Thomist ideas. By the late 1910s, Servaes’s work combined such Catholic influences with new Expressionist styles and techniques. When he was commissioned to produce the Stations of the Cross for the Carmelites in Luithagen, he sought to present the Lord’s Passion in a manner that would simultaneously convey something of the early Carmelite mystics’ views of Christ’s suffering and call back to God contemporaries who had witnessed the darkness of the First World War and, in many cases, turned against religion. The Luithagen Stations brought about conversions. They spoke powerfully, too, to many Catholics, both lukewarm and devout. But their exaggerated lines and stark emphasis on Christ’s agony disturbed some pious onlookers. Controversy over the Stations began to swirl. Complaints were sent to Rome. Fr. Jerome and other devout churchmen and laymen, including Maritain at this stage, came to Servaes’s defense. Another Carmelite priest, Titus Brandsma from the Netherlands, attempted to help Servaes by publishing with him a small book of meditations on each of the charcoal images. Brandsma would eventually die at Dachau and be beatified by Pope John Paul II. But in 1921, his book, which included reproductions of Servaes’s drawings, was likewise reported to the Holy Office. In the Vatican decree that came down in March, Brandsma’s book of meditations was deemed inappropriate for Catholics, as were the Luithagen Stations, which were taken down. Many prominent, faithful Catholics were dismayed, including the French Dominican priest and theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. But no one with real influence in the Church—and no one who hoped to attain such influence in the future—challenged the condemnation, despite its unprecedented character. END OF EXTRACT en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Servaes
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 30, 2021 21:50:28 GMT
A defence of ressourcement theology by a quasi-trad admirer of Dorothy Day, who describes discovering ressourcement writers in seminary after dismay at the discovery that the old manuals which after a trad upbringing he regarded as models of orthodox theology tended to be as dry as dust, to be self-referential and to ignore questions which contemporaries, including himself, saw as urgent/ One interesting point he makes is that manuals often treated Scripture not as connected text/Story but as a source of disconnected prooftexts, as if the only way to approach God was through analysis (within limits - he also notes that general principles were seen as not open to analysis because they were divine commands, rather as if God was a Roman Emperor or early modern absolutist king issuing Roman Law decrees with the force of law). I start to see the point St Bernard was making when he remarked - "It was not by dialectics that God chose to save His people". gaudiumetspes22.com/2021/08/08/ressourcement-theology-a-personal-narrative/
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 1, 2021 12:38:13 GMT
Yes this is an interesting treatment and the link to the commentary on Traditionis Custodes he provides. And there is an important point in both. Many traditionally minded Catholics through Thomistic manuals on one hand and the TLM on the other have painted themselves into a corner. Resourcement Theology is one way out and this is a clear defence of this.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2022 19:26:54 GMT
Another argument that the Council was the great achievement of the ressourcement thinkers, who were working to address problems to which neo-Thomism and Constantinianism had no answers and which would eventually have produced the crisis in which we now find ourselves even if there had been no Council, or the original schemata had been voted through and everyone had gone home for Christmas. Chapp argues that this was then hijacked by "the progressive wing of the Church" whose project was not to go back to the sources but to assimilate to the spirit of the age; he sees Dorothy Day as part of the solution. gaudiumetspes22.com/blog/vatican-ii-as-a-ressourcement-council-part-one-father-robert-imbellis-conciliar-retrieval While much of this is quite impressive I can see a couple of problems: (a) Chapp's distinction between ressourcement thinkers and "the progressive wing of the Church" does not address the question of how far sections of the ressourcement thinkers were or became "the progressive wing of the Church"; the fact is that the ressourcement movement split after the Council and many subsequent dissensions derive from this. (Think of Joseph Ratzinger's career as resembling the development of Edmund Burke from defender of the American Revolution to denouncer of the French Revolution.) Furthermore, one reason why many trads admire the neo-Thomists is that the latter predicted that the ressourcement project would produce some of the problems which did indeed materialise. (b) he does not fully address the ways in which the Council contributed to the subsequent chaos by fostering the view that everything was up for grabs, by developing personal links between previously isolated dissenters etc. That said, I agree with him that there would have been a crisis sooner or later and that the apparent highpoint of 50s suburban Catholicism was a transitional moment which was under strain well before the Council. (c) The trouble with Dorothy Day and the "small but pure church" model is that it easily shades into Pelagianism in which there is hope only for a spiritual elite and everyone else is written off. Part of the defence of Constantinianism is that it's part of a project of evangelising everyone, though bear in mind that it can just as easily evangelise the wrong way, as for example when the Mafia in southern Italy traditionally used confraternities and shrine committees as front organisations.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 11, 2022 16:35:42 GMT
I am generally reluctant to link to RORATE CAELI because a lot of their stuff is extremely dubious, but this is a well-reasoned argument that many of the Church's problems antedate the Council and date back to the French Revolutionary era and the limitations of the ultramontanist movement (e.g. centralised bureaucracy leading to micromanagement, emphasis on blind obedience over all). The author seems alive to the limitations of the pre and post-conciliar Vatican without relying on conspiracy theories, substituting rhetoric for argument, or demonisation. The major limitation seems to be that he does not spell out the implications of his view - what does he think should have been done differently at various points, and what are the likely consequences? What should the authority of the Pope and bishops amount to in practice, and what would this entail? At the back of my mind is a niggling worry that his views might entail excessive diminution of papal authority. rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/01/ultramontanism-its-life-and-death.html#moreThe comparison with the last decades of the Hapsburg empire is painfully cogent, given the tendency of many trads to uncritically idealise that empire (I am not denying that it had its virtues.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 14, 2022 18:03:07 GMT
I have a couple of problems with the RORATE piece linked above, based on what it DOESN'T say: (1) How far was ultramontanism inevitable given such factors as better transport and communications, the demise of Catholic confessional states etc? What alternatives could have been or should be produced? (2) How much authority does the writer think the Pope should have? (3) If the pope disagrees with the writer's answer to (2), what does the author think should be done next? I worry that the potential for schism is there in these silences, whether or not that is what the author intended.
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