Summer 1967

THE PRODIGAL SON

by Egon Weiner

CIVITAS DEI

FOUNDATION

Episcopal Patron.s

The Most Reverend Cletus F. O'Donnell, J.C.D. The Most Reverend Bernard J. Sheil, D.D. The Most Reverend Raymond P. Billinger, D.D. The Most Reverend Aloysius ]. Wycislo, D.D. Trustees

Rt. Rev. Msgr. John D. Fitzgerald Rt. Rev. Msgr. J. Gerald Kealy Rt. Rev. Msgr. John M. McCarthy Rt. Rev. Msgr. Arthur F. Terlecke Rev. Stanley C. Stoga Founders

Rt. Rev. Msgr. T. A. Meehan Rt. Rev. Msgr. Eugene V. Mulcahey Rt. Rev. Msgr. James V. Murphy Rt. Rev. Msgr. Martin E. Muzik Rt. Rev. Msgr. Gerard C. Picard Rt. Rev. Msgr. Stanley J. Piwowar Rt. Rev. Msgr. Edward J. Smaza Rt. Rev. Msgr. James A. Walsh Rt. Rev. Msgr. Richard F. Wolfe Rt. Rev. Msgr. Raymond J. Zock Very Rev. Msgr. J. D. Connerton Rev. Francis R. Krakowski Rev. Edward T. Kush Rev. Joseph ]. Mackowiak Rev. Francis C. Murphy Rev. Stanley R. Petrauskas Rev. Harry C. Rynard Rev. Stanley L. Ryzner Rev. Joseph I. Schmeier Rev. Harold H. Sieger Rev. Andrew T. Valcicak Charter Members

Rt. Rev. Msgr. Thomas ]. Burke Rt. Rev. Msgr. D. F. Cunningham Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis ]. Dolan Rt. Rev. Msgr. John R Ferring Rt. Rev. Msgr. James D. Gleeson Rt. Rev. Msgr. Patrick J. Gleeson Rt. Rev. Msgr. James C. Hardiman Rt. Rev. Msgr. James D. Hishen Rt. Rev. Msgr. Michael J. Kilbride Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis I. Lavin Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A. McMahon Rev. Raymond J. Ackerman Rev. Anthony Chisek Rev. Francis M. Coyle Rev. William R. Doran Rev. Arthur E. Douaire Rev. Francis D. Hayes Rev. Alfred J. Henderson Rev. Edward M. Hosty Rev. John J. Kane Rev. Claude E. Klarkowski ACTA

Rev. Walter F. Somerville

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CHICAGO

STUDIES

EDITORIAL STAFF Editor George J. Dyer Associate Editors John F. Dedek, Carl J. Moell, S.J. Business Manager Production Manager Edmund J. Siedlecki Richard J. Wojcik Editorial Advisors Martin R. Borowczyk Joseph T. Mangan, S.J. John R. Clark Thomas B. McDonough Thomas F. Connery, S.J. John P. McFarland, S.J. Stephen E. Donlon, S,J. William E. McManus Robert H. Dougherty Charles R. Meyer Joseph M. Egan, S.J. Thomas J. Motherway, S,J. John F. Fahey Norbert E. Randolph Thomas J. Fitzgerald Robert A. Reicher John J. Foley, S.J. Richard F. Schroeder John R. Gorman William A. Schumacher David J, Hassel, S.J. Peter M. Shannon George G. Higgins Eugene P. Slania Stephen S. Infantino Edward J. Stokes, S.J, George J. Kane Theodore C. Stone Julius F. Klose Thomas F. Sullivan Edward H. Konerman, S.J. William G. Topmoeller, S.J. William P. LeSaint, S.J. Gerard P. Weber Raymond 0. Wicklander CHICAGO STUDIES, edited bl' the faculty of St. Mary of the Lake Seminary and the priests of the Archdiocese of Chicago, with contributions by prominent scholars and authors, aims at an articulate presenta-

tion of the best that modern scholarship has contributed to the profes¡ sional knowledge of the priest in the fields of scripture, theology, liturgy, catechetics, canon law, philosophy, sociology, and related sciences.

The editors welcome articles and letters likely to be of interest to our readers. All communications regarding articles and editorial policy

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CHICAGO STUDIES is published three times a year with ecclesiastical permission and copyright, 1967, by Civitas Dei Foundation, Box 665, Mundelein, Illinois 60060. Third Class postage paid at Newark, Ohio.

Views expressed in the articles are those of the respective authors and

not necessarily those of the editors or editorial board. Indexed in The Catholic Periodical Index and New Testament Abstrcu::ts.

VOLUME 6

SUMMER,

1967 .

NUMBER 2

Con ten~ Artick& THE NEW MoRALITY, CATHOLIC STYLE DEWART ON FAITH THE NEW DESIGN OF LITURGICAL MusiC

115

John F. Dedek

127 ChriJtopher Kiesling, O.P. 139 Richard /. Wojcik

PHILOSOPHY AND

CoNTEMPORARY MAN

155 Gerald F. Kreyche

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND APOLOGETICS

169 George K. Mal<me

PASTORAL CATECHETICS PoRTRAIT oF A CoNTEMPLATIVE CoLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND CHURCH-RELATED INSTITUTIONS

187 Gerard P. Weber 199 Clilford Steven&

207 Robert A. Reicher

The Forum A NEW PAIR OF GLASSES

219 Robtrt H. Dougherty

I

Those who have done their moral theology in the tradition of early 20th century manualisis doubtlessly are familiar with this argument: the natural law does not change because human nature does not change ( cf., e.g., Noldin I, n. 116).

But they probably are not familiar with St. Thomas Aquinas' argument that the natural law does change because human nature changes ( cf. Sup pl. 41, 1, ad 3; 50, 1, ad 4; 11-11, 57, 2, ad 2; De Fuchs' relative Malo 2, 4, ad 13.). The mannatural law and â&#x20AC;˘ ualists reasoned from the subRohner's existential stantia]¡ immutability of huethics take us beyond man nature to the immutability the static essentialism of the natural law. It has been characteristic of mediocre theof Noldin. ology in the past not to have + recognized the important effect that accidental changes in JOHN F. DEDEK man's nature have on the natural law. + Natural law is founded on human nature. But human nature IS not a univocal term. Some scholastic manuals of moral theology seem to take it to designate pure nature, that is, human nature as a philosopher might see it, unelevated, independent and altogether outside of a supernatural order or destination. But pure nature is only one of MoRAL SuRVEY

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the many ways in which human nature can exist, and of all the possible ways this is one way in which it never in fact did exist. Modern writers, like Josef Fuchs, are convinced that the imperatives of the natural law are more than a hypothetical ethics based on a hypothetical man. They bear on路 man as he actually is and so are based, not on pure nature, but on the being of man as be actually exists.

Human nature which is the basis of natural law is the nature of man in general as it is variously realized in the various stages and situations of human history. When considered meta路 physically human nature is in its essentials immutable. But looked at historically it is in constant motion.

CHANGE IN SALVATION HISTORY

The most decisive accidental change in man's nature oc路 cured with original sin. The result was a decisive change in natural law. For instance, before the fall man had the natural right and duty to organize natural societies like the family and the State, and these societies had the natural rights of authority.

But in the state of original harmony the natural right to exercise authority did not include the right of coercion as it does today. This became necessary only after the inner harmony of the primal state was destroyed. Accordingly, civil authority always had the natural right and duty to promote and protect the common good. Before the fall, however, this did not include the natural right to wage a just.war or inflict capital punishment.

Human nature in the abstract prescinds from these rights; human nature before the fall excludes them, while human nature after the fall demands them. Similarly, human nature in the abstract founds an obligation -to avoid danger of violating the sexual order; but more specific obligations were different before the fall than they are after original sin and the resulting concupi路 scence in man's nature. Again, the natural right to private property is consequent upon man's nature as it exists after the fall but not before it. Also, material cooperation in the sin of another, for instance, by enacting or applying positive legislation providing for civil divorce is permitted and in fact de-

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manded by the natural law today but would have been contrary to it if man had maintained his primal condition. The general obligation of natural law to promote the common good of society allows and even requires such legislation in the present condition of the human race but would have excluded it in our original state.

RELATIVE NATURAL LAW

It should be clear therefore that there are both absolute and relative precepts of the natural law. Some precepts are valid absolute! y because they are rooted in human nature in general, that is, in the nature of man absolutely or abstractly conceived.

But other precepts of the natural law are relative, that is, valid only in certain periods of human history because they are based on the nature or being of man as it exists at a particular time.

Therefore only those statements of the natural law which are founded in the absolute or abstract nature of man are absolute (e.g., the State's right and duty to promote and protect the common good). But those special determinations of the natural law which were valid only before the fall (e.g., no right to wage any war) or are valid only after the fall (e.g., right to wage a just war) are relative, since they correspond to the rela¡ tive or changeable elements in human nature.

CHANGE IN PERIODIC AND INDIVIDUAL HISTORY

What is more, the change in the natural law is not limited to the change made in human nature by original sin. Even if Adam had not sinned other accidental changes in man's nature would have occurred and with them a corresponding change in natural law. For instance, the relations of man to his economic environment would have changed as economic con¡ ditions varied; therefore the general absolute precept of justice, unicuique suum, would have found application in different relative precepts according to the exigencies of the particular economic conditions.

Similarly, within the present period of salvation history accidential changes in human nature continue to take place, and

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these changes involve corresponding historical changes in the natural law. For instance, the influence of the superabundant grace of Christ in New Testament times modifies the use of authority and its coercive rights. Also, there are natural rights which are determined by the economic or social conditions of the time, such as capital punishment, a family wage, interest taking on loans, workers' participation in management, and perhaps even private property. One cannot say that these rights are so absolute as to belong to the natural law necessarily and under all conditions. They are relative to the historical situation.

NoT RELATIVISIM

To distinguish this view from ethical relativism it is critical to see that the relative precepts of the natural law are applications of the absolute natural law and not its formal alteration.

The absolute precepts are not adapted or altered to fit the concrete situation but applied to it. There is no formal reversal of the absolute precepts but only their material determination.

The absolute natural law is general and open to further specification. In fact, it demands that its principles be applied in accord with the real conditions.

This concept of absolute and relative precepts of the natural law is quite different from that of certain Protestant theologians who use the same terminology. For them the absolute natural law is that of man's original state (primary natural law), and the relative natural law is that which governs his fallen condition (secondary natural law). But neither of these, they infer, absolutely oblige man, since the primary natural law is no longer relevant to man's present condition, and the secondary natural law does not represent God's original wilL Hence, to know God's will in the present man must have recourse to revelation or subjective indications.

Certain Catholic writers apparently were influenced by this thinking, teaching that the natural law, with few exceptions, is relative, mutable, and always adaptable to every situation. In 1956 this teaching was interdicted in an instruction of the Holy Office (AAS 48-144). But it is to the credit of this famous

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document that it carefully distinguished between the adaptation and the application of the natural law, thus leaving room for the opinion of those Catholic theologians who, following the lead of St. Thomas and many of the fathers, look at man's nature not only metaphysically but also historically.

In contrast to the Protestant view which sees the primary natural law as absolute and the secondary as relative, this Catholic opinion holds that both primary and secondary are relative: they are both applications of the absolute natural law to the historical situation. The absolute natural law is based on those elements which belong to the essence of man absolutely. These are those elements which belong to the metaphysical definition of man as well as those which are consequent upon his physical nature, for instance, bisexuality. This law binds absolutely in every period of man's history. The relative natural law, on the other hand, is based on the contingent elements in man's nature, and it too binds absolutely as long as the contingent elements which determined it continue in fact to exist It is true that modern Catholic theologians, like Rahner and Fuchs, see an authentic morality as necessarily situationaL They describe their theories as a moderate situationism or an existential ethic. But they are careful to distinguish them from the more extreme forms of situation ethics which Pius XII and the Holy Office have called the "New Morality."

EXTREME SITUATIONISM

Situation ethics is not a univocal term designating a worked out system of ethical thought. It is a slippery expression that is applied to certain philosophical and theological tendencies, strains of thought, and halting efforts at generalization. It would be unfair to appoint it a precise definition or univocal sense which it does not yet in fact possess. But perhaps it is possible to distinguish the principal trends and describe their central or predominant features.

The most extreme form of situation ethics is taken by certain French existentialists like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Rooted in atheism and actualistic personalism it is professedly antinomian. It is described by Sartre as a "morality of au路 thenticity." Reality is altogether discontinuous. Each person, action, and situation is new, unique, and unrepealable. No ethical norms can come from God, since there is no God; nor can they come from man's nature, since man is not a nature but freedom. This freedom of man is unlimited and the only genuine value. And the only moral demand on man is the full development and actulization of his personal fredom.

Theistic existentialists, like Jaspers and Marcel, also see man as basically freedom but with the personal responsibility of determining himself and his choices according to those oh路 jective values which his own conscience can appreciate. All general ethical norms or rules, however, are meaningless, since the objective values can never be known in abstract concepts or iitcorporated in general principles. They can he reached only in concrete existential contact in which man himself is person路 ally engaged in giving value to the existing situation.

Protestant situation ethics takes many forms. A handy summary of these forms can be found in the June issue of Theological Studies. But even a lengthy survey finds it difficult to do justice to the numerous strains of situationism among both continental and American Protestant theologians. Nonetheless, for our limited purpose of defining the situationism of current Catholic writers against the background of the situationism un路 acceptable to the Holy Office, it may he sufficient to describe Protestant situationism in its very general features.

Its most striking characteristic is that it denies absolute validity to universal laws. It considers universal norms of morality, whether based on man's nature or coming to man through divine revelation, as perhaps useful and indicative of God's will but not as absolutely and unexceptionally binding.

As a consequence, each person must decide for himself what God's will is for him here and now in this situation; for ultimately God's will for man is found in the concrete situation and not in abstract laws. It may be helpful to notice that the starting point of Protestant situation ethics is quite different from that

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of Sartre' s morality of authenticity and unlimited freedom. For its theological foundation is not atheism but, it seems, the Lutheran conception of original sin and its destructive effects on human nature; and philosophically it seems in many cases to be rooted in nominalism rather than actualistic per~onalism or existentialism.

THE CATHOLIC STANCE

According to the 1956 instruction of the Holy Office these ideas have influenced the thinking of certain unnamed Catholic theologians to the extent that their ethical theories are not com¡ patible with Catholic moral doctrine. This instruction points out that these Catholic authors held that the ultimate ethical decision of man is not an application of the objective moral law to a concrete situation according to the rules of prudence.

Rather it is the immediate internal judgment of the individual through which he knows what is to be done in the present situation. Moreover, the instruction says, these writers hold that while there are perhaps a few absolute principles deriving from metaphysical human nature, for the most part the precepts of natural law are based on existing human nature and so are relative, changeable, and can always be adapted to any si tua ti on. As a consequence, each person has to make his own ethical decisions according to his own subjective conscience by means of its individual lights and personal intuition rather than in accord with objective laws.

A MODERATE SITUATIONISM As we have already seen, this instruction does not exclude Fuchs' concept of an historical natural law which finds diverse applications in relative precepts in accordance with changing historical situations. For Fuchs, the demands made on man are not static but neither are they subjective. The admission of relative precepts is not the same as relativism, nor is a dynamic theory of nature necessarily a theory which is not objective.

The instruction does not condemn every form of situation ethics but only that which has as its ultimate objective norm¡ some interior personal judgment or subjective persuasion which

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is not based on and measured by an objective standard or norm existing outside of man's mind. This objective standard, the instruction says is Esse.

It is important to see that the objectivity required by the instruction does not consist necessarily in the universality of objective laws. Objectivity and universality are not the same thing. Therefore, it is quite possible and compatible with the instruction that the objective norm which determines the judg¡ ment of one's conscience is a particular prescription arising uniquely out of the concrete situation.

A situation ethics which rejects the absolute validity or binding force of all universal norms is caught up in the error that each person is in all respects unique, that there is nothing at all common in human beings, and that it is impossible for man to have any universal knowledge which represents and applies to objective reality. But a purely universal ethics appears to make another mistake by assuming that a universal principle or a series of them can exhaustively capture the total concrete reality. There are certainly common elements in human nature that ground moral principles which are universally binding.

But there is also a unique element in the spiritual person that can not be reduced to any general principle. Therefore, if esse is morally normative, why only part of it? It seems arbitrary to say that the only basis of moral decision or formation of con¡ science is that part of reality which is abstracted in universal concepts and that the unique and ineffable part of the same reality makes no ethical difference. It seems only consistent to say that as the common elements can found universal laws, so the unique, singular elements of the concrete situation can ground concrete imperatives which are valid and normative in the existing situation.

In other words, a deductive, syllogistic ethics, which applies a general norm to a more particular (but still general) casus or even to an existing situation may not be sufficient to disclose a moral imperative that in fact represents God's will binding a person's conscience in a concrete situation. Take as an example a young girl faced with a decision about her

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special vocation in life. Universal nom1s applied to her situa路 tion will reveal to her that she may not become, for instance, a prostitute or an extortionist. But after applying the universal norms to her situation, she is still left with a number of options: for instance, she may join the peace corps, go to graduate school, enter the convent, or marry one of three eligible suitors.

From the fact that these choices are morally indifferent in the ah路 stract it does not follow that they are all morally indifferent for her in the concrete, so that she may do as she pleases in so far as God is concerned as long as she does not violate some universal rule. It is difficult to believe that what she actually does in these important areas is a matter of indifference to a personal God who is not just concerned about mankind in general but calls each one of us by name.

The most practical and difficult problem with this theory concerns the way of knowing the individual ethical imperative.

Rahner 路suggests that there is a function of conscience which grasps the concrete imperative arising out of the existential situation. The fact that we do not possess a developed theory or clear reflex knowledge of the formal structures and basic nature of perceiving the existential moral imperative is no proof that all ethics is essentialist and deductive. Just as there was logical thought before the development of formal logic, so there can be existential ethical decision without a formal doctrine of existential ethics.

THE INADEQUATE UNIVERSAL

There is, of course, no question here of the concrete im路 perative contradicting the universal law or repealing it, as it were, in the particular situation. To affirm this would be in principle to fall into extreme situation ethics. But, as we saw earlier, general absolute precepts of natural law find diverse applications in more particular relative precepts in accordance with the special circumstances of the situation. What is more, the external formulations of the moral law are often inadequate statements of it. Negative precepts of the natural law exclude certain actions as being morally evil ex objecto,

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and therefore they are binding in the concrete no matter what the circumstances or situation. But here we must always be on guard against inadequate articulations of what precisely is in fact forbidden. "Thou shalt not kill" is an obvious example of an incomplete formulation, and some of the prohibitions against mutilation provide other instances of inadequate formulations which had to be made more precise after the discovery of the possibility of organic transplantation.

But more significant and of practical importance is the inadequacy of universal formulations of affirmative precepts. The traditional Catholic moralist recognized this fact but explained it badly when he said that these precepts bind semper sed non pro semper. The application of "excusing causes" to universal precepts is simply a way of providing for the fact that the universal law is not adequately formulated so as to include the true law in every situation. The exception admitted by the classical moralist is only an apparent one as far as the true moral law is concerned. It is not an exception to the true moral law but only to an inadequate statement of it: and it is an inadequate statement precisely because of its universality: as a general principle it does not state the true moral imperative for every possible situation. That fundamentally is the reason St. Thomas says that certain precepts of the natural law bind only ut in pluribus. For the abstract universal principle does not adequately prescribe what specific value is actually to be pursued by every individual person in every concrete situation: FuRTHER READING

Readers who are interested in studying these ideas in more detail might begin by reading Josef Fuchs' Natural Law: A Theological Investigation, published by Sheed and Ward. Then they might tum to some of the essays of Karl Rahner, particularly his article "On the Question of a Formal Existential Ethics," which appears in the second volume of his Theological Investigations, published by Helicon Press. The ideas of Rah¡ ner are developed in The Dynamic Element in the Church, published by Herder and Herder, and in two chapters on situa-

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tion ethics in Nature and Grace, published in paperback by Sbeed and Ward in London. Also, an important and interesting Protestant contribution has just been made by Paul Ramsey in his Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics, published by Scribner's.

Leslie Dewart has sensed the need of integrating Christian theism with the experience of contemporary man. He has also had the ambition and the on courage to make a bold move to satisfy this need in his book, The Future of Belief (Herder and Herder). His project has included an extensive analysis of the nature of faith. Faith A critique should be defined as "the ex路 of Dewart's answer istential response of the self to certain problems to the openness of the transon the nature cendence disclosed by con路 of faith scious experience. It is our decision to respect, to let be, the contingency of our being, and therefore to admit into our calculations a reality beyond the totality of being" (p.

64). It is both "our openness + to the openness of transcendence . . . and the return or CHRISTOPHER self-projection of ourselves KIESLING, O.P. toward the ultimate transcendence" (pp. 64-65). + "Christian belief is a religious experience . . . dif路 ferent from no other experience-it is a conscious awareness of the same epistemological order as ordinary 'knowledge.' Its difference ... has to do with that of which it is an experience, namely, a transcendent reality first adumbrated negatively in the empirical apprehension of the contingency of our own he路

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ing" (p. 113). Also, "unlike ordinary knowledge, faith is the conscious experience of something inevident" (p. 113) and must be said "to be due to God's initiative" (p. 114). "Consequently, the Christian faith is never found in the state of a 'pure' religious experience . . . . In reality the Christian experience of faith can be found only as conceptualized and, therefore, under one culture form or another" (p. 114).

An element of faith, though not its totality, is conceptualization of the transcendent disclosed in conscious experience.

What does "experience" signify here? "Experience" in the definition of faith signifies the same kind of epistemological reality found in ordinary human knowledge. Human knowledge and experience are consciousness, man's being presenno himself (p. 80), the fundamental datum about which there can be no doubt and on which thought can build securely (p. 82). More· over, "all human consciousness is cast in concepts, and con· versely conceptualization is the elementary cultural process by which animal knowledge becomes elaborated into the psychic life which is proper to man" (p. 100). Consciousness is "part of the process of biological evolution" (p. 100), man's "coming-into-being," both his emergence from the realm of animal life and the ever-increasing intensification of his peculiarly human being (pp. 91-93, 112-13).

The question arises: What is the transconscious value of this human experience, knowledge, consciousness, or conceptulization? Does it manifest anything beyond itself, beyond the experience, beyond the "coming-into-being" itself?

The answer at first appears to be affirmative. The partial definition of faith says that the transcendent is disclosed through conscious experience. Human consciousness is unique insofar as it is "the emergence of a self as it becomes present to itself by self-differentiating itself from the totality of being .... man's psychic life ... is the mind's self- differentiation of itsself out of a reality with which it was originally continuous and united in un-differentiation" (pp. 90-91). Truth is "the result of the mind coming· into· being through the self-differentiation of that·which-is into self and the world" (p. 93). Human

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consciousness distinguishes self from non-self, from world, and in the case of religious experience, from the transcendent.

But is the distinction in consciousness between the self and non-self the same as transconscious knowledge? Is the process of self-differentiation Irom non-seH in consciousness a judgment about the reality of the non-self outside of consciousness?

Or is it at best awareness of a distinction between self and a non-self which stands over against the self in knowledge but does not necessarily have reality outside of consciousness?

A philosophy which bases itself in consciousness is always in peril of idealism. It can protect itself, and must, by affirming as self-evident the extra-mental reality of what is perceived in consciousness. A philosophy which has to protect itself against idealism in this way makes me uneasy. As I read or listen to its exponents, I feel that I have cut ties with reality and common scense, and have been led into a realm where it is extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy. Valuable insights result from this sort of philosophy, and it is necessary as part of man's total philosophical effort. But is it a sufficient tool for exploring and preserving the Christian faith in the world of tomorrow? Is it, particularly, the most suitable in the American milieu? The world, language, action-things "out there"are more fundamental to Americans than consciousness.

But let us take Dewart's idea of knowledge, that it is the conceptualization of reality disclosed in experience, and let us suppose that this experience discloses reality which exists independently of human consciousness. How do we know if our conceptualization of experienced reality is correct or true?

Dewart may answer this question negatively, saying that it illegitimately supposes that concepts and experienced reality stand over against one another as image and imaged. For Dewart, concepts constitute experienced reality, and experienced reality constitutes concepts. But this brings us back to the question of the transconscious value of experience. It also raises the question: Do philosophy and the sciences seek to know the reality disclosed in experience, or the experience disclosing reality? If the latter, then once again we are going down

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the road toward idealism. Hence the question is still urgent: What is the criterion for the correctness or truth of concep· tualization relative to reality which comes to light in ex· perience?

Dewart answers that "the only valid 'criterion' of truth is that it create the possibility of more truth. And the most reliable sign that we are coming to the truth is that we are dissatisfied with it" (p. Ill). But what is this "truth" which must create the possibility of more "truth"? It is not conformity, corres· pondence, likeness or similarity between our conceptions and reality (pp. 92-95, 110) . ''Truth is not the adequacy of our representative operations, but the adequacy of our conscious existence. More precisely, it is the fidelity of consciousness to being" (p. 92). "Truth might . . . be called an adequation of man to reality, in the sense that it is man's self-achievement within the requirements of a given situation" (p. 110, emphasis in original). This adjustment of man to his situation recogniz· ably exists insofar as it makes possible future adaptation to new situations.

This concept of truth is valid for what Scholasticism calb practical truth: prudential and artistic truth. The truth of moral and artistic judgment is not found in the conceptual cor· respondence to a deed or an artifact, for the function of the prudential and artistic judgment is to bring that deed or artifact into being. The truth of practical conceptions is precisely their adequacy to the demands, both universal and particular, subjective, inherent in the situation. (This does not necessarily mean conforming to the situation; the situation may demand our resisting it or changing it, in whole or in part:) Truth as man's adjustment to reality is valid for the ontological truth of man: man in his very being, which is conscious, moral, cultural, ought to be adjusted (though not necessarily conformed) to his situation. But does this concept of truth apply to conceptualiza· tion in the order of what is called speculative knowledge, which by definition explores transconscious reality to discover its constitution?

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AN OVERLY MECHANICAL VIEW Dewart thinks this definition of truth is applicable to speculative knowledge. He does so, in my opinion, because of his basic notion of knowledge as the conceptualization of experience. As we have seen, this notion leaves in question the transconscious reality of what is known. In the perspective adopted by Dewart, consciousness and its contents are the range of our speculation; what lies beyond consciousness and its contents is not our concern. 'To manipulate conceptions, to alter conceptualization, is to change reality; changing reality ipso facto involves adjustment of conceptions. Hence, the man who does not alter his conceptions when most other men do is left standing in a different reality than the others. His thought ceases to be true. This is the plight of Christian thought today.

Dewart's theorizing about knowledge and truth seems to rest on an overly mechanical view of knowledge. He tends to make knowledge the process of producing concepts. Thomist philosophy (here definitely not synonymous with Scholasticism) does not define knowledge in that way, for it opens the door to conceptualism. Thomist philosophy defines, or more accurately describes, knowledge as intentional union of the knower with the known, a view which has influenced modem thought through Brentano and Husser!. Knowledge is left a mystery in Thomist philosophy; little more is done than describe the kind of change that occurs in knowing, in contrast to the kind of change that occurs in chemical reaction or biological processes: it is an immaterial change resulting in a union of the interacting factors which is not like the union of the interacting factors in physical change.

More positively, knowledge is a subject's having the form of another as other, that is, being determined by another without ceasing to be radically the subject that it is. (Does Dewart misinterpret this phrase, "having the form of another as other," by understanding it as a description of what is known rather than as a description of what knowing is?) Another positive expression for knowledge is intentional union of the knower with the thing known, for in knowledge, the being of the knowing

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subject, determined by the thing known, is directed toward the thing. (Note: toward the thing, not merely the thing known, the object.) Dewart's terms "intussusception," intentional "appropriation" or "acquisition" (pp. 80, 182) and his use of them have a connotation which cuts off knowledge's orientation of the being of the knowing subject to transconscious reality.

When it comes to explaining how immaterial change can take place, how the form of another can be had as other, how intentional union can be brought about, recourse is had to similitudes, images, concepts, ideas (though not, significantly, for knowledge of the external senses). But, at least in Thomism, knowledge does not consist in producing these; knowledge consists in the intentional union or the determination of the subject's being in such a way that he is what he knows without ceasing to be what he is. The dynamism of the mind, ita natural appetite for knowledge, is not satisfied in the production of concepts, but in intentional union with transconscious reality.

Since no similitudes or concepts perfectly bring about this union, the mind is ever busy conceptualizing to achieve more perfect union. Analysis of a concept of a thing leading to a multiplicity of concepts results not merely in knowing more things about the one thing (pp. 87-88); it is perfecting the knowing subject's intentional union with the transconscious thing.

A

DANGER OF IDEALISM

The nature and goal of knowledge as intentional union with transconscious reality must be kept in mind and not replaced by the mechanism which makes it possible. This notion of knowledge is admittedly abstract, metaphysical, and analogous relative to physical change, hence also largely negative. But unless a theory of knowledge is kept in this dimension or at least continually judged by this dimension, the theory degenerates into a psychism, a theory of producing concepts, the conditions for knowledge rather than knowledge. The final result is conceptualism and idealism.

The mind's drive toward ever-closer intentional union with transconscious reality demands ever new conceptualization of

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reality, not only in the sense of analysis of already formed concepts, but also in the sense of forming new concepts which approach reality from another point of view, as Dewart wishes to do for the modern age. Since the knowledge relationship is between the knowing suhje~t ~nd things (not merely things known, things as objects, but things as they are), and since no concepts adequately grasp things in their totality, many conceptualizations or systems of conceptualization are called for, each disclosing and unfolding to the knowing subject different facets of transconscious reality.

These various conceptualizations of reality should not radically contradict one another, for their object is reality, which is not a self-contradiction. These conceptualizations, however, may be quite diverse, and one more meaningful in one culture than in another, for it may coincide more perfectly with the common mode of conceptualization in that culture. What has inhibited dogmatic development in the Church (apart from numerous historical circumstances of a political and moral nature) is not a theory of truth as correspondence between the mind and reality, but a failure to recognize the limitations and historical character of concepts and the demands of the mind to know reality, which can never be exhaustively conceptualized.

Much of the Scholasticism of the past centuries has been, in the final analysis, an unconscious conceptualism as intellectually unsound as some of the modern philosophy which it has condemned.

AN EXPERIENCE oF Goo

Another difficulty is Dewart's notion that faith is an experience of God. "God can be adequately conceived by us in the concepts of empirical intuition because he is experienced by us as a reality given in empirical intuition. But since he is not an object of thought or a being, the experience of God is the experience of an inevident reality. Hence, the experience is ... of the order of belief . . . . It is an experience in essentially the same fundamental sense as any other: when¡ we believe in God we experience him. This means that although God is not an object of empirical iniuition, his self-communicat-

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ing reality (that is, his self as rendering itself present to us) is experienced by us in the empirical intuition of objects, principally and most immediately in the empirical intuition of consciousness, selfhood and existence as objec~s of thought" (p. 179, footnote).

What is the content or object of the concept of God? God "is not an object of thought or a being;" so the content or object of the concept of God cannot be "godness," or however one would express it, perhaps "ultimate transcendence" in Dewart's terms. No, God is conceived "in the concepts of empirical intuition." Is then the concept of God the same as the concept, or the totality of concepts, of empirical intuition? How then distinguish this view from pantheism? Is the believer's concept of a sunrise, or the totality of his concepts of empirical reality, different than a non-believer's, because the believer's includes God in it? But then God is becoming the object of a concept, at least a partial object or a modality of an object, which is impossible for Dewart. Perhaps the concept of God is abstracted from the concepts of empirical intuition. But this again makes God the object of thought and makes faith an experience, not of God, but of the concepts of empirical intuition or something in them. ¡ If Dewart is going to talk about God, then he must conceptualize God somehow. Yet it is not at all clear what this conceptualization is. If in the final analysis he is forming a distinct concept of God from empirical experience, then he must use that concept according to the rules of analogy. Dewart is wrong when he says that "the method of analogical predication is no longer useful" in developing the Christian concept of God (p. 178); it is unavoidable. Does he not use the words reality and presence analogously in reference to man and to God? He is correct when he says that "the method is rightly called analogical predication. It does not provide analogical understanding" ( p. 179), taking the word "understanding" in the sense of modem philosophy (Dilthey) as the kind of knowledge man has of himself in contrast to the kind of knowledge he has of rocks or atoms, a knowledge from within

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aided by affectivity, in contrast to knowledge from without.

Faith is not, in my thinking, the experience of God; it is an understanding of God in the sense mentioned just now; it cannot escape the limitations of analogy in its conceptualization.

Too STRAINED A MEANING Quite apart from the epistemological problems presented in the affirmation that faith is the experience of God, I do not find the affirmation a description of my religious experience.

I have desired to be a priest since I was in grade school; I have been a religious for twenty years. But I would never say, except in an extended and loose sense, that I have experienced God. I have had experiences which involved memorable affective conditions and striking insights into the meaning of my life and occurrences around me. I attribute these experiences and their content to God, but I would not call them experiences of God. They were experiences of God's effects, but not of God. Some may call experiences of God's effects the experience of God, but that, in my opinion, is stretching the meaning of the word.

If I say that I experienced God's effects rather than nature's or man's or the subconscious', this is because I have faith, that is, a personal self-projection of my being toward God through a freely willed affirmation of his reality conceptualized in a proposition by means of which I direct myself toward him.

My faith is a leap into the dark, not merely certitude added to the light of experience. Because of this faith, both its sel£. projection and its conceptual affirmation, I am able to, and in fact do, interpret experience and reality in a way in which I would not interpret them without faith: I interpret them as coming from God and leading to God. Faith is not an ex· perience of God; but given faith, experience is transformed into· God's self-manifestation.

Dewart maintains that his notion of faith adequately accounts for what faith is: "a coming-into-being ... a perpetual achieving of the unachieved ... in real life . . . not the act, but the life of faith" (p. 65). The Scholastic notion of faith, "an

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intellectual assent (under the impulse of the will) to the truth of revealed propositions" (p. 64), is insufficient, since it un¡ derstands the "act" of faith as a discrete operation ( p. 65).

Dewart would object to my defining his notion of faith as simply the conceptualization of the experience of transcendence, because that would only partially define faith as he understands it. Faith, for him, involves also "an existential response," a "return or self¡projection of ourselves toward the ultimate transcendence." Similarly for the Scholastics, and St. Thomas in particular, faith as assent to the truth of revealed propositions is by no means the whole of faith.

FAITH FOR ST. THOMAS

What Dewart puts forward as the Scholastic or Thomistic notion of faith is a definition of formless faith, "dead" faith, faith without charity-an imperfect virtue or imperfect realization of human potential, in St. Thomas' terminology; a deficient "coming-into-being," in Dewart's terminology. Faith is not adequately accounted for except in conjunction with charity, for only with charity is faith in its normal condition and the reality which God intends it to be; only with charity is faith simply faith without qualification. Charity is not merely a veneer laid over "dead" faith leaving faith intrinsically unaffected; faith existing with charity is intrinsically perfected by charity, not because faith with charity differs from faith without charity in that to which it projects man, but because its projection is fully actualized and intensified by charity. Furthermore, faith, at least in St. Thomas' thought, cannot be divorced from the functioning of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the gifts of understanding and knowledge, which always accompany charity and the indwelling Spirit.

Faith for St. Thomas is not assent to revealed propositions, but a personal response or assent to a personal God who offers himself to man in history and in Jesus Christ as man's ultimate fulfillment. (Note the existential aspect under which faith attains God: a good to be opted for or rejected.) Dewart in a lengthly footnote (p. 167) claims that his affirmation is specious,

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that in the final analysis, according to St. Thomas, "what we really assent to are the propositions about God . . . belief in the propositions of the creed amounts to belief in God himself, because the propositions of the creed are true .... Obviously, this is a pre-critical understanding of faith" (emphasis in original). Such an affirmation results from focusing all at¡ tention on the propositional aspects of faith explained by St. Thomas, while ignoring what else he has to say about faith as an activity of a free agent, a person, conditioned by charity, humility, and obedience.

In view of the unexplored territory into which Dewart has ventured in his attempt to integrate Christian theism with the experience of contemporary man, we should not be surprised that he has not been successful in explaining everything to our satisfaction. The value of faith as knowledge of reality, the criterion for the truth of faith, and the manner in which faith attains God are some points which remain to be explained more adequately.

I.

It began in September, 1958.

"It" is the entombment of most of the Catholic liturgical music of the past and the seeding of the new-renewed or redefined if you prefer-role of music in the liturgy. The 1958 instruction on Sacred Music began it all as music's response to Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei, the theological ancestors of more active congregational participation in the liturgy. The 1904 Motu Proprio of Pius X on music that the 1958 document referred to was no longer the definiThe impact tive Torah and Mishna of of Vatican II church music. It was now conupon American musu:zans sidered a prophetical document and communities from a quickly receding past. of worship The Motu Proprio confronted the sins of its own time and re+ affirmed the core of tradition that had been lost or subRICHARD J. WOJCIK merged in the social and cul+ tural revolutions of the postTridentine western world. The Instruction of 1958 took a new tack. Like the decree revising the Holy Week rites in 1955 it was a probe or at least a hesitant sign of the coming revolution in liturgical rites and music.

The Constitution on the Liturgy from Vatican II (1962) projected the new course through necessarily broad and com-

LITURGICAL SURVEY,

cliturfjicaf

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prehensive principles. The document was refreshing in its themes yet frustrating because it was not concerned with too many specifics. Each of its principles was surrounded by many qualifying conditions that had to be verified and played off against each other to effect a change. Through subsequent Instructions of Implementation in 1964 and 1967 new choices were made after the conditions were confronted by pastoral and social circumstances. As a result we no longer ask the stone age questions: should we change or can we risk a new course? Now the inescapable questions are: how far can we go and how quickly can we move?

The immediate concern of this article is to outline the new perspectives in church music. We will consider the dominant new ideas, the status of their implementation and report on the people who have shaped them in this country.

THE THEORETICAL REVOLUTION

The words and phrases most consistent! y used to describe the new approach are: simplicity, assembly consciousness, external participation, emotional impact, contemporary relevance, national and local identity and artistic excellence. These ideas are not listed in order of importance. Rather they are all facets of a very honestly complicated challenge and have usually been individually expounded with partisan passion. The words and phases are self-explanatory for the most part. More exactly they are gigantic nets. encompassing divergents schools of interpretation and application. What follows will be directed to what is emerging as a resultant composite esthetic of worship music where the interacting ideas become practical realities.

AssEMBLY Sacred music is functional music that fundamentally derives its holiness and excellence from its connection with the liturgical action (Vat. II., n. 112.). All thoughts of the freedom, independence and formal refinement of the arts must confront this fact. Previous generations of liturgical literature centered on the details of the act. This attention was so concentrated that

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worship was more and more formalized or objectified. The people were expected to enter into a very tight! y structured, some say dehumanized, ritual. Music followed this pattern. But Vatican II reclaimed the principle that liturgical music functions for people and so it must begin with the people it serves and expresses. They glorify God in as much as they are edified.

The Council considers full and active participation of the people the primary concern of restoration or reform of music.

All liturgical discussions must begin with these questions: who are we and what are we doing in worship? "We" here means the parishioners. The relevant application of these ideas to specific groups of worshippers naturally flows from this basic unit of the church.

Most essays start with a disquisition on "community at worship." Community is an overworked tag in contemporary liturgical literature. What complicates the matter is that community is somewhat inaccurate to describe the people's experience of worship. The words describes more the effect or the ideal pre-condition of worship. The more specifically accurate word for the people at worship is assembly. As Father Floristan discussed the idea in Vol. 12 of Concilium (pp.33 ff.) assembly signifies an organized body of groups of people both antecedently and subsequently different in social relationships.

They represent different communities of family, neighborhood, work, age, language, etc. In worship these groups achieve or strive to expand an existing faith community through unity in Christ. Unity is the hallmark of assembly. This unity can be enhanced by existing social community but is not totally identical with it. The liturgical assembly is then a reunion of the faithful in and by Christ for their own good in approaching God. Recent literature insists on the necessity of small groups, preferably already welded into tightly knit communities, being the basic unit of the participating people. How practical this ideal is in metropolitan complexes is very debatable. But these theologians have made their point. We shall see more social community identity by age, apostolic concern, or any other

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legitimate bond of community of social status or responsibility.

Only such a personal experience of community can be an effective basis of developing a sense of universal community of the people of God in the body of Christ. This will be the ideal liturgical assembly.

This idea of the assembly then is probably the key new idea. In fact it is so new that the word assembly only began to appear in a liturgical context about fifteen years ago. The elements of its definition first appear in Vatican IL In its present stage of understanding this idea is responsible for the repeated insistence on the concept of roles in the liturgy which epitomizes the new approach to music. These roles are assigned tasks for the purpose of assembly, ranging from the formally ordained presidential role of the priest to the designation of gift-bearers at the offertory procession. In between are the people present, the lectors, servers, the song leaders, and the artists who serve the united action of the assembly. In such a context all actions and music but serve to elicit effectively the best common consciousness of what transpires in worship.

The automatic conclusions that must be drawn from this idea redirect or redefine traditional music and ritual. The celebrant faces the people. The music must be the sound of the assembly. A lay lector helps proclaim the revealed word of God. The homilist shepherds the assembly's understanding and response to the word of God. The proceedings must be conducted in a viable language. There must be a rapport between service content and real life.

Aside from those general observations about music, what has this meant for the use of music at worship? The succeeding Instructions on Implementation (1964 and 1967) began to spell out a new hierarchy of concerns and emphasis that departed from "traditional" practices. The approach was practical: the consistent integrated use of music more strictly related to understandable actions and symbols; more and varied hymnody appropriate to the season or purpose of liturgy; three degrees of sung congregational participation in a high Mass based on

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parochial resources; the most recent limitations on the use of choral music; the logical extension of the vernacular; the growing insistence on contemporary styles; the expanding permissiveness for the use of instruments. All of these themes reflect the assembly idea as a reality principle in worship.

The themes are either explicit in the texts or gain a new implicit emphasis by the tone of the Instructions. The themes are inescapable to any objective reading that is not unalterably committed to a rigid, univocal sense of "tradition."

INSTRUMENTS

The organ is the king of church instruments but now it governs in a constitutional monarchy, so to speak. The documents now permit the territorial bishops to allow other instruments to serve the song of the assembly. The only restrictions placed on the bishops' decisions are those of taste and cultural sensibilities. The documents presume that experts and artists will be the prime resource persons for the bishops in this matter. Theoretically the doors are open to electronic guitars right on up to the most sophisticated devices of serious experimental music. Anything is possible that could accompany or produce music for worship without alienating the congregation or parodying the art of music. Debates over instruments now center on what is objectively in good taste and practically effective. There is much blind defence of the organ and much irrational propaganda for the guitar. In the hands of competent performers either instrument is a source of beauty and prayer.

When handled by incompetent people the bad effects are in direct proportion to the excellence of the instrument. The Council recommended the highest professional standards as the ideal hoped for from every zealous amateur who offers his services to the assembly MUSICAL STYLES

Many writers would have us believe that the only thing Vatican II did was to acknowledge the heritage of authentically traditional choral music and ecclesiastical chant. Yet in the

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very acknowledgments the fathers qualified their endorsements by phrases that amounted to "other things being equal." Those "other things" were an understanding of the Latin language and the musical style, the possibility of performance participation by the congregation, plus theological consonance of ideas with the statements of Vatican II concerning faith and worship. It did not take any subtle insight to recognize that "other things" were not equal.

The subsequent Instructions began to shift their emphasis to vernacular songs and contemporary styles as the preferred music of the assembly. Chant is now regarded as "a basis of great importance for the cultivation of sacred music" (1967), not as the standard practical repertory. It is more of a means of education than participation. In the choice of choral material words like "new works" and "modern idiom" now appear on equal if not more insistent terms with "traditional heritage." The most significant evidence of the changed attitude occurred in the May 1967 Instruction. Here experts were directed to reexamine that heritage in terms of modem needs.

Material that does not fit a pastoral celebration or the nature of the renewed liturgy is to be removed from the liturgy and transferred to non-liturgical religious devotions. Perhaps this is cruel or dramatic but the word from Rome is: "fit the new spirit of the liturgy or get out" (Instruction, 1967, n. 53).

Antiquity has lost its unqualified priority.

Folk and popular idioms pose special problems. They are real music, however plain and elementary their degree of refinement. But they do not have carte blanche rights in the liturgy any more than more serious art music does. Much fine folk material we hear from the entertainment world has been commercially bastardized, to use a mild phrase. If proof is needed, Leonard Bernstein has shown again and again that most popular music is textually and musically infantile, lacking poetry and musical craft. Yet both of these styles speak most immediately of and to the people. It is true that from the maelstrom of every fad a few songs emerge that one can sing or care to remember without embarrassment. The kernel of

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good music is surrounded by a gross husk of triteness. Yet if the liturgy needs music of immediate relevance and appeal, authentic folk styles and popular rhythmic and melodic idioms can be the most penetrating commentaries and emotionally satisfying expressions of modern man at prayer. We need these styles in the liturgy if only to stay honest and avoid fake sophistication. But they must be developed by artists. If they are not good art at their level of expression, we could very well wallow in an insipid swamp of religious sweat without sense or faith.

Again, the doors are open but the last Instruction is cautious.

One would judge that the post-conciliar commission is not sure how strongly the western world is attached to its traditional music. Neither is it certain just how ready the people are for the new sounds in church or how capable we are of producing new art quickly.

SACRED AND SECULAR

An issue that arises from the last category discussed is the debate about what is sacred and what is secular in church art.

This is becoming a discussion of epic proportions. The best philosophers, theologians, and cultural scientists are begining to tangle publicly on this issue. The pages of Catholic maga¡ zines are filling up with data and insights. At the risk of invading angelic off-limits it can be observed that theoretically you cannot distinguish between a sacred and a secular art in terms of artistic skill and insight. Yet in practice, and this is the level at which the Instructions seem to approach the issue, it is demonstrable in the greatest works of liturgical music that artists do not approach sacred, especially liturgical subjects, with the same degree of freedom and abandon that they treat secular subjects. In the liturgical context they reflect a more rigid discipline over their insight and craft that is dis¡ cernible if not always definable. They must communicate in an effective way with a living assembly or they miss their mark.

With that remark we must quickly retreat from the arena of speculative debate. It must be observed however that among

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the younger generations there is a decreasing sense of distinc¡ tion between compartmentalized notions of sacred and secular.

With what often appears as frustrating candor they refuse to have their lives cut up into sacred and secular moments or activities. It appears that either a new synthesis is in the making or new definitions of sacred and secular will be forged.

One of the most recent stimulating contributions to the debates is Man at Play by Hugo Rahner, S.J., published by Herder and Herder.

PARISH MUSICIAN

Over the years American musicians moved in either of two directions. One direction was playing and singing for high Masses and training the choir. The other combined liturgical responsibilities with an educational role in the parish school.

The Instruction of 1958 seemed to recognize this and opted for a composite definition of the parish musician. He (she) was expected to be a musician of completely trained musical pro¡ ficiency. He was to be liturgically well educated even as the clergy was to be. He was to be a teacher both for the children in school and for the adult congregation. He was described as a kind of minister of music and not a hired hand doing a part time job.

Now as the role of congregational music expands, the need for a true minister of music is reenforced in the documents.

He is seen as the one who will interpret and develop even the simplest expression of the art of music in worship. Even the decree creating the permanent diaconate recognizes that a director of music would be one of the authentic ministries of a permanent deacon (deaconess?).

As noted above the documents reflect the thinking of the post-conciliar commission that there must be people of musical competence and liturgical formation handling the parish pro¡ gram of liturgical music. Amateur spontaneity breeds long term chaos at the price of liturgical significance. Good will, fidelity, punctuality, youth, zeal, etc., can make the working environment admirable. But they cannot achieve in years what

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competence in music and liturgical sense can achieve in months.

Vatican II extolled this fact. The Council was specific enough to urge that artists be equitably paid and respectfully consulted and heeded in planning sessions relevant to parochial liturgy. Finding such people or subsidizing their education should be a concern of every parish and more so of the whole American church.

The introduction of the parish leader of song marks a return to an ancient and most natural role under the category of church musician. The leader is both a congregational director and a cantor. The need for such a role is evident from the nature of group singing-the assembly idea again. He (she) sets the pace and visibly organizes and inspires the singing. His musical competency is understandably minimal, a good voice, musical sense, and effective presence. While this role can just as easily be handled hy a competent organist from the instru¡ men!, the leader can heighten the transmission of the organist's or music director's intentions to the people. If the leader is an accomplished singer he can enrich the celebration with per¡ sonal artistry everyone appreciates.

CHOIRS

One sad aspect of the renewal in church music has been the "hang up" over the role of the choir. The status of the choir has almost exclusively dominated the polemics between the musicians and liturgists (liturgiologists). They were working against each other when they most needed each other. The docu¡ ments have been uniformly explicit. Most of the commentators on the documents have quite plainly not been faithful to the spirit of the decrees. In the documents it is not a question of whether there will or won't he choirs. The documents transmit this question. In effect they say, "You have a choir. Fine, take care of it. You don't have a good choir? Develop one." The documents removed the restrictions on women in choirs, urged composer"s to write for small parish choirs, told priests to counsel and instruct them, encouraged choirs of reknown to keep their repertory and influence alive, etc. More explicitly, and

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this is where the debate centers, the documents repeatedly and in unmistakable terms say that the function of the choir is now limited. Its activities must be re-directed to suit the present and projected directions of liturgical reform.

Quite categorically the documents call for a suppression of the former practice of having the choir sing all of the music at a high Mass. At most this should now only be done infrequently for special occasions or in special churches at special times where the tradition is particularly appreciated (1967).

The normal role of the choir now is to he a variable enriching contributor to the assembly's musical expressions at Massnot just permissively but by artistic and social right. This means singing parts or all of the Proper and/ or parts of the Ordinary as much as possible with the congregation. To try to perpetuate the former practices of the choir (or the organist) singing all the Proper and all the Ordinary is indefensible and bespeaks total incomprehension of what the church has been saying for the last ten years. The new role of the choir is to lead the other people and to help to teach and inspire them. Note that the choir is perfectly free to perform any parts (but not all the parts in one Mass) of the sung texts of the liturgy. The "Holy, holy," however, should normally be a song of the whole assembly. The old total "choir Masses' should disappear as the normal participation of the choir at Mass. The end product then is a Mass of the whole assembly using all of its resources of congregational singing blended with the individual talent and artistry of its musicians. It is not a choral concert or recital, however moving such experiences can be.

DETOUR

Let me digress for a moment. Why has there been so much heated confusion about the role of the choir? The liturgists were not very gentle, understanding, or accurate as they proclaimed the new status of choirs. Not a few pastors or priest directors of liturgy were led to believe that they should suppress their choirs. One can never be sure why this happened.

The reasons offered vary from bitter accusations by the choir

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that priests were too cheap to allocate funds for new music to the priests' hiding hehind a prudential decision to focus all energies on congregational singing. You have heard the 101 other reasons.

Most in evidence is the reluctance of choir director to abandon much of their Latin repertory. They and their choir members loved it. It was their chief expression and so often only compensation for serving the liturgy. They were not try¡ ing too hard to hear what the documents were saying. The parishioners loved the music. Everyone feared the major surgery the documents decreed. New vernacular music of worth was and is slow in coming. Choirs were not accustomed to contemporary styles. English translations of the Mass texts were uniformly unattractive and composers held back expecting more abrupt ritual changes or better texts. Average choirs were left high and dry feeling unappreciated, handcuffed, and disillusioned. Many directors fought a strong delaying action from the citadels of Latin repertory. They ended by being counted out of the renewal. But as renewal progressed their absence was keenly felt. Their artistry and technical skills were crucial to progress. Happily there are signs that the damage is being undone by dialogue and abundant good will in a spirit of mutual forgiveness between musicians and liturgists. One looks on this scene of frustration with sadness realizing how so many of us are totally unaware that this all happened before in the Protestant Reformation. At least now it is happening more rapidly. How easily Christian patience, understanding, and cooperation could have avoided this spectacle.

LANGUAGE

The official insistence on Latin is growing weaker by the document. In recent public homilies and addresses in Rome Pope Paul has all but buried Latin as the language of parochial liturgies. Obviously this is a realistic, common-sence, pastoral approach to worship. The permission for the canon in the vernacular is an inexorably logical expression of this principle.

Where Latin is capable of being understood and appreciated it

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needs no official defense as a vehicle of prayer. Where it is not so regarded its use is a pointless or at best dubious academic exercise. We can expect even less emphasis on Latin in the liturgy in future communications. Weep or rejoice but the deed is done.

The practical consequences of this fact make the present situation of vernacular music a trying one. Protestant vernacular music is a limited help because of the Elizabethan character of its texts, which are too dated or other-wordly and limited in their appeal. "Quaintly pious" is a fair description of many of them. The prosaic American alternatives are so uninspired as to have an understandably short life expectancy. So the present and immediate future of change calls for much patience and will be expensive as hymnal revisions and expansion proceed.

Here we must also insert a word about the publishers of liturgical music. They have taken a beating. When the abrupt switch to English occurred in 1964 one publisher was "caught" with a stockpile of $30,000.00 worth of excellent Latin material.

This year one of the leading publishers decided in June not to publish any more new music in English for the rest of the year. The flagrantly sinful violations of copyright laws oc路 casioned by the perfected copying machines have all hut killed the publishing industry centered on liturgical music. Each of the publishers has bulging files of evidence of wholesale copy路 right violations all done in the name of holy religion. Every路 one is singing their music but very few are purchasing it. In some way the Catholic community or the bishops of this country must address themselves to this injustice. Without effective mass distribution of new good materials which publishers subsidize and disseminate the future looks devastatingly hor路 ing for vernacular church music. The days of the country parishes built around self-contained communities with their resident creative artists are gone. We need the publishers and we must recognize and help solve their problems.

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151 HIGH AND LOW MASSES

In a short time the distinction between high and low Masses will disappear. We will soon only have varying degrees of a sung liturgy as the normal form of worship. The distinction between high and low is still on the book~ as th'l May 1967 Instruction noted. But the very same document points up the inexorable evolution of worship to a sung liturgy characterized by variety in music based on parochial resources. It shows little more than a verbal distinction between high and low Masses.

There may be some good reasons why the distinction is perpetuated but they are not evident, in fact hardly imaginable.

What results from the new decree is a permissive desire to have as much and as varied music as possible in every liturgical celebration. We understand that a bishops' committee is addressing itself to the legal and economic problems arising from the dissolution of the technical classifications of high and low Masses.

THE CONGREGATIONS

By now the reader should have an understanding of the extent of the variety possible for congregational music. Pastoral experience of renewal to date has not come up--nor will it ever-with a magical formula for a program that achieves the ideals of the Council. The basic ingredients of success are clear; competent musicians, attractive music of quality, adequate instruction, continuing motivation, variety of forms and styles, cultivation of artistic talent. The mixture of ingredients varies from parish to parish, even from assembly to assembly in a parish. The cardinal sin is to sell the art of music short even in congregational singing. People are continually exposed to competence, imagination, and fantastic variety in the music business. Bad music and fumbling programming of church music cannot long hide under a tolerant mantle of good will.

In this regard the documents at times read like teachers' manuals indicating what an informed leadership should be doing. In recent months the feeling has been increasing that time is running out. The voices from the pews are getting louder and more angry in their frustration. They resent being saddled

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with four or eight invariable hymns by what is most charitably referred to as a complacent rubricism that is satisfied with minimal or indifferent sounds of singing. If we do not fill the chuches with good and satisfying music we may empty them of people. Do not be too surprised to hear of pickets with placards calling for progress and renewal of hymnody showing up outside some church on Sunday.

ExPERIMENTAnoN

The realization of the ideals of the Council has been en· trusted to the supervision of the national bodies of bishops.

As of late 1966 and 1967 the official statements of American bishops present a positive, permissive attitude. This marks a significant change. Their earlier statements sounded more like horrified reactions to mistakes and excesses. Now through the national advisory boards of liturgists and musicians the bishops must soon formulate a broad program of experimentation. The Instructions of 1964 and 1967 counsel this. Interested observers all agree that to be of any value experiments must be planned, reported, and correlated. Otherwise they are simple "fun and games" or will·o·the·wisp occurances of no significance. The greatest hope for the future of the liturgy and its music lies in widespread experimentation at all levels of Catholic life.

This is how the people will express what the Spirit is saying to them and the bishops then can discern his will in our days.

Seminaries can be of greatest help in this phase of progress since they have or should have an environment conducive to responsible trial and error with informed guidance.

PosiTIVE RESPONSE OF AMERICAN MUSICIANS

American church musicians are still shifting gears, so to speak. They are still adjusting their attitudes and resources.

Their attention had to shift from their exclusive concern for the one or two parochial choir Masses to the from four to eight other Sunday Masses and the weekday Masses without choir support. The rather loosely defined community of church musicians looked for leaders to help them clarify their at· titudes, respond to their problems, and evaluate new materials.

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A galaxy of composers, musicologists, educators, performers, pastors, and music directors wrote or lectured about the reform.

The vast majority of commentaries gave evidence of a positive, genuine concern for renewal. Yet all too often there was a debilitating, predictable tone of special pleading for one or more details of change. Opinions and anathemas ranged from the rigid, idealized traditionalism of Father Schuler (St. Paul, Minn.) through Father Lindusky's (National Catholic Music Educators Association) and Sister Theophane's (Milwaukee) perspectives of liberal¡ arts education in American culture to Dennis Fitzpatrick's (F.E.L. publisher) pleas for adventuresome creativity suited to adolescents and young adults.

Four persons have emerged as the most influential theoreticians and leaders of the new era in the U.S. They are Archabbot Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., Paul Henry Lang, Father Frederick McManus, and Father Joseph Gelineau, S.J. All others, be they journalists, educators, composers, organists, teachers, or members of music commissions, gravitate to one or more of these leaders. Together these four people present the most balanced, comprehensive, and realistic overview of the needs of the liturgical music of our time.

THEIR CREDENTIALS

The Archabbot is a musicologist and liturgist with a clear, objective understanding of the history of liturgical music. He participated in Vatican II and is active in the episcopal echelon of reformers.

Paul Henry Lang of Columbia University and former chief music critic for the New York Times best knows the American climate. As a music critic and educator he has both reflected and formulated the definitions of Amer~can musical culture and brought these conclusions to bear on church music.

Father McManus, a council peritus and consultant scholar to the Roman post-conciliar commissions, is one of the chief liturgical advisors to the American bishops. He is a liturgical expert of international fame who demonstrates a thorough understanding of the theoretical and practical implications of the changing role of music.

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Father Gelineau of France was the first writer to offer a comprehensive, coherent, historically and pastorally accurate analysis of liturgical music. He is a liturgical scholar, a competent musicologist, and pastorally experienced musician.

This is the basic bibliography these men have produced: I) the book Voices and Instruments in Christian Worship by Joseph Gelineau, S.J., Liturgical Press, 1964; 2) the address of Paul Henry Lang at the 1966 International Chureh Music Congress in Milwaukee, published in Sacred Music, Vol. 93, Winter 1966-67; 3) the address of Archabbot Weakland to the 1966 meeting of liturgists and musicians in Kansas City, published in Crisis in Church Music, 1967 (the proceedings of that meeting), Liturgical Conference Publication, 1967; 4) the commentaries of Father McManus on each of the documents from the Holy See beginning with the 1958 decree, appearing shortly after each decree in Worship magazine or released by the N.C. News Service.

The contributions of each of these men rate separate articles.

Their works must be read entirely to savor the depth of wisdom, experience, and vision they offer toward understanding the on-going renewal. And understand we must, because the 1958 Instruction dropped a grenade among liturgists and musiCians and the Instruction of 1967 pulled the pin. It's no dud!

At first glance, nothing could seem farther apart from contemporary man than philosophy. And if we take philosophy for its caricature, this position seems quite credible, for contemporary man is the man on the move, the activist, the go-go man of the sixties.

Philosophy after all traffics in ideas and theories, and who today has time to indulge in such luxuries of the ivory tower? Yet the lie must be given to this appearance and the political analyst, Walter Contemporary man is Lippmann does so when he the search for truth, states: the love of wisdom, "There are those who would philosophy personified. say, using the words of philosophers to prove it, that it is the characteristic illusion of the tender-minded that they GERALD F. KREYCHE believe in philosophy. Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach and theorize. And + being theorists by profession, they exaggerate the efficacy of ideas, which are airy nothings without mass or energy, the mere shadows of the existential world of substance and force, of habits and desires, of machines and armies.

"Yet the illusion, if it were one, is inordinately tenacious.

and

Conlemporar'l

+

155

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It is impossible to remove it from the common sense in which we live and have our being. In the familiar daylight world we cannot act as if ideas had no consequences" (The Public Philosophy, Boston, 1951, p. 91).

As a matter of historical fact, philosophy has always proved to be most influential, not in times of quiet, hut in times of unrest and crisis. This was true in Athens and Rome in ancient times, in Paris and Oxford in medieval times, in London and Koenigsberg in modem times. It is also true in our time which is pockmarked by unrest and crisis.

Quite confidently and without exaggeration, it can be said that philosophy and contemporary man were made for each other. In fact, they are in love with one another and know one another, thinking each other's thoughts as only lovers can do.

But like so many lovers, philosophy and contemporary man are not aware of this perfectly obvious fact.

Perhaps this state of affairs can be better understood if we describe both contemporary man and philosophy. We will then be in a more favorable position to see how each is meaningful and necessary to the other.

HoMo ANxms Contemporary man is no longer the homo spectans of ancient Greece, nor is he the homo theoreticus of the Latin West in the middle ages. Instead he is homo anxius! He is a man de¡ throned, living in tension between the individualism of Ayn Rand and the collectivism of the followers of Karl Marx. This dethronement and tension were his because he was heir to the legacy of four massive insults hurled at mankind over a period of five centuries. These insults are described by the Canadian psychiatrist Karl Stern in his very readable work, The Third Revolution.

The first was the "cosmic insult" which Copernicus threw at man, displacing man and his earth from the center of the heavenly stage. Man's place, the earth, became simply one more planet revolving around the sun. Later came the "biologi¡ cal insult" delivered by Darwin who saw man not as a fallen

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angel, but as a risen animal. Hard upon this came Freud's "psychological insult" declaring that man's consciousness and its acts were like the visible part of an iceberg. Mind's most .important determinant lay hidden beneath the surface in ' the massive unconscious. Lastly, but coupled with this in time, came the "cultural insult" by Marx. It argued that the history of human progress was explainable, not in terms of the be¡ nevolence of human charity, but by the laws of economic greed.

These four insults have left their mark on a shattered human dignity, requiring man to reappraise this vaunted dignity and to reestablish its basis. Contemporary man accordingly lives in the post-modern world described so elequently and so pessimistically by the theologian, Romano Guardini, in his book, The End of the Modern World. Man today lives in alienation.

He abides in a world of unnatural nature, manipulated but not understood by science and technology. This estrangement is also felt by the student of today being exposed to the non-professing Professor and the unbelieving man of faith who holds a charter membership in the God-is-dead cult.

There is everywhere today the paradox of a sense of urgency, but a lack of immediacy. Intermediaries have become so important so as to overshadow the principal involved. This gigantic world of artificiality has often abetted the condition of man's estrangement. Examples are all too numerous in nearly every field.

In politics, the heads of states find they seldom can get heyond the structured situation superimposed by their flunkies.

Face to face confrontation is a rarity. In respect to foodstuffs, the farmer producer and the city consumer grow farther and farther apart, separated by more and more middlemen. The same relation increasingly obtains between the worker and his product, increasingly mediated as it is by automation and the machine. The scientist and nature are mediated by mathematical symbolism. Even the intimate relationship between man and wife is mediated by direction from an antiquated interpretation of natural law theory which historical studies show as unjustified. Religious who are intellectuals and their published

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efforts are mediated by the whims of an imprimatur, more concerned with conformity to the past than adaptability to the present.

Man's moral actions are excessively mediated by his deliberating intellect which sometimes ignores the whole man.

Well can the Benedictine, Dom Graham, write: "There is more to be said than is often allowed for trusting one's instincts; they can on occasion prove a safer guide to appropriate action than the careful calculations of reason.

Living in a continuous present, one needs not be anxious about tomorrow (Zen Catlwlicism, New York, 1963, p. 155).

Anxiety then and dread (which unlike fear has no specific object of concern) mirror the life of contemporary man. It can be seen in the struggle between the polarities of the individual and the collective; the good of the person and the good of institution. In our technological society, it is evidenced in the organism fighting to survive against art and the machinean organism which like a machine has already been identified with its functions. As the French personalist, Gabriel Marcel, observed, man today is the victim of the insidious identification of having with being. We are someone only to the extent that we have something; we no longer are anyone when we no longer have anything, when we can no longer function.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO A CROWN

In short, contemporary man has been ousted from the throne to which his forebearers laid absolute claim. But was it a rightfully founded claim? Or was it a dynasty to which man had only been a pretender? Perhaps the place man lost was never really his. Perhaps like the man who claims to have lost his faith, what was lost instead were the faulty pinions on which that faith supposedly rested, but in reality did not.

Perhaps he put his faith in spectaculars, and then, these later proving incredible, he rejected faith itself, never understanding the meaning of the myth of the spectacular.

If such be the throne we have lost, we may all say good riddance. And it is our contention that such is the case, with-

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out making man today lord of the absurd. So many of the previous titles accorded man were titles to which he had no right, for he had not earned them. He merely bestowed them on himself. Yet today he sees the need for dignity, honestly won, and he has begun earning that dignity. He is proving himself to he not what, but a who; not merely an individual, but a person; not simply a member of a herd, but a sharer in society.

And what has been the state of philosophy? It has paralled the rise and fall and rise again of man. With Socrates in classical Athens, philosophy was factually what it claimed to be literally, a love of wisdom. It found its embodiment, not in abstract mind, but in the concrete person. It was a search more than a solution, yet was certainly no relativism.

In the middle ages, but more especially with the later manualisis absolutizing the thinking of the middle ages, philosophy became pufied up and pretentious, often generating more heat than light. It pretended to have become the impossible--the science of all things! Having been made the victim of its own fancy, like the "self-made man who adored his maker," phisophy no longer had need to look outside itself. Instead, it began to identify itself with its own history. Philosophy became what philosophers said and narcissism ruled the day. An ex facto warning by Marcel is clearly to the point here: "The philosopher runs the risk of cutting himself ofi, in some sense from life, and of little by little, without being aware of it, substituting for life a realm of thought which is quite his own, a sort of closed and well cared-for garden whose shrubs and bushes he expertly lops and prunes" (Man Against Mass Society, Chicago, 1962, p. 105.

To some extent, philosophy toward the end of the middle ages was killed by attempting to become a rationalist Christian philosophy. It died, for the adjective mortally wounded the noun. Becoming the maidservant of theology (or perhaps we should say of theologians), philosophy unwittingly deteriorated into the status of a kept woman, unable to look her fellow sciences shamelessly in the eye. Commenting on this phenome¡

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non, in his inaugural address at the Sorbonne, the late phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty declared, "Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it" (In Praise of Philosophy, Evanston, 1963, p. 44).

A DOSE OF

SKEPTICISM

The corpse of philosophy remained, but the spirit left and entered other fields of endeavor, namely the sciences, which rightfully broke free of the . yoke of philosophy made into theological bread and wine. Philosophy had become dogmatic, too certain, and in so doing, lost its birthright, a sense of wonder. In full agreement with the Spaniard, Ortega y Gasset, we must say, "The intellectual vigor of a man, like that of a science, is measured by the dose of skepticism and doubt which he is capable of digesting and assimilating" (What is Philosophy? Evanston, 1963, p. 44). At the same time, we must cite Ortega's approval of Herbart's statement that "Every .good beginner is a skeptic, but every skeptic is only a beginner" ( J. F. Herbart, as quoted by Ortega y Gasset, p. 172).

We encounter such skepticism in Socrates, but we also find there the warning issued in the Phaedo, that we must be on guard lest we become misologists (haters of reasoning), merely because reasoning is difficult and sometimes leads us astray.

Again we quote Merleau-Ponty: "It is possible to fear that our time also is rejecting the philosophy that dwells within it, and that once again philosophy will evaporate into nothing but 'clouds.' For to philosophize is to seek, and this is to imply that there are things to see and to say. Well, today we no longer seek .... Having passed a certain point of tension, ideas cease to develop and live.

They fall to the level of justifications and pretexts, relics of the past, points of honor; and what one pompously calls the movement of ideas is reduced to the sum of our nostalgias, our grudges, our timidities, and our phobias. In this world, where negation and gloomy passion take the place of certitude, one does not seek above all to see, and, because it seeks to see, philosophy passes for impiety (p. 41-42).

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Historically, genuine philosophy has always been a form of impiety, but so has truth when opposed to the establishment.

And perhaps here we can find the basis for predicting the wedding between the lovers, philosophy and contemporary man. It will not be a marriage of convenience, but one between two parties which have common ends. Ii it be true (as sixteenth century Pierre Charron says), that the one science and the true study of man is man, it is equally true that the proper study of philosophy is man. This is not meant to confme phi¡ losophy only to an anthropology. It is to declare however that philosophy is basically homo-centric in its point of departure, regardless of the object it seeks to investigate. Supporting this view is Marcel who states, "There can be no philosophy worth considering that will not involve an analysis of a phenomenological type, bearing on the fundamental situation of man" (p.

122). More than ever before, we now realize that while we should bend every effort, we cannot fully transcend the human conditions of our historicity and situationality in the world, located as we are in a particular spatial-temporal-cultural millieu.

Previously we had been under the misapprehension that it was metaphysics which determined the philosophical view of man, when in fact quite the reverse had been the case all along.

Our philosophical view of man determines our metaphysical perspectives. This thesis is easily verified historically. Those whose implicit philosophy of man was that of "a thing a_mong things," became pure empiricists and metaphysical nominalists.

Those whose implicit philosophy of man was that of "a being above the world," became the metaphysical idealists and ra¡ tionalists. Without belaboring the point, it is clear that many problems in the history of philosophy could be more readily solved by psychology than by philosophy. (Of course it should be equally patent that many problems in the history of psychology could be more readily solved by philosophy than by psychology.) But we have been speaking of what philosophy has been. We must now ask, what is the state of philosophy today?

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In the Anglo-Saxon world, philosophy's dominant spokesmen are in the analytic and positivist tradition. Now the analytic tradition is a long and honorable one, but it is more a legitimate method than an illegitimate philosophy. As for positivism, the critique given by the German existentialist Karl Jaspers still seems sound. He says, "Positivism, which is relevant only to particular situations, becomes when rendered absolute in the form of the 'new positivism,' a mask. In it, people can conceal their own aridity, the individual counting exclusively as a fulfilled function, and losing his validity in the semblance of unlimited¡ jejuneness. They grow afraid of their own words, wishes, and feelings. Nothing remains but technical questions; and when these have been dealt with there ensues a dumbness which is not the produndity of silence but merely an expression of vacancy" (Man in the Modern Age, Garden City, 1957, p.

180).

Nor is Jaspers the only critic of positivism. Even Adam Schaff, the leading Polish Marxist, takes sharp issue with the Nco-Positivists in their reductionist attempt to dismiss meaningful questions as pseudo-problems. Declares Schaff, "To call a problem a 'pseudo-problem' does not abolish it; it merely hands the problem over to those least equipped to tackle it seriously.

The traditional mystification of a problem does not abolish either the problem or the possibility of its scientific analysis.

'What is the meaning of life?' 'What is man's place in the universe?' It seems difficult to express oneself scientifically on such hazy topics. And yet if one should assert ten times over that these are typical pseudo-problems, problems would remain (A Philosophy of Man, from excerpts contained in Reflections on Man, New York, 1966, pp. 307-308).

In Europe (and to a lesser extent we can observe its growth in America), the dominant philosophy is existentialism using the techniques of phenomenology. It has undeniable leanings toward personalism, even when it is atheistically oriented as in Sartre. It would do well for us to remember that the positive atheist may simply be an abortive saint.

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An important segment of philosophy today, then, has the same aspirations as contemporary man, aspirations which un¡ mistakably point to personalism. Descartes' dream is being replaced with Marcellian hope; philosophy is finally becoming incamational. The categories which philosophy previously used to separate from man, are becoming more unified through their reference to man.

Time, for example, is no longer dismissed as an accident and as the Aristotelian "number of motion according to before and after." Quite the contrary, as Heidegger points out, time is the very being of man. The father who gives of his time to his children, clearly gives more than the "number of motion according to a before and after." In giving of his time, he gives of his being.

Place is no longer the "outermost limits of a surrounding body viewed as a container." When referred to persons, it may be described more aptly as the locale of meaning, intelligibility, and fullness. When a mother goes to a hospital to have another child, she has left more than her place behind, more than an empty space. For what was formerly a home is now only a house. What remains has no existential meaning, for its principle of interiority has left it, its subjectivity has been removed, What remains is the pure world of isolated and disunified objectivity, the Sartrean world of l'en soi (the in-itself) in which no meaningful becoming can occur. It is a world without le pour soi (the for-itself) to give growth and to render it unifed and significant. ¡ THE PHILOSOPHICAL MAN

The philosophical man of today can ¡ be characterized as Ortega y Gasset depicts him, a hero, an intellectual hero. He must live in a state of tension between faith and reason, empirical knowledge and intuition, always seeking to preserve his identity as a "for itself' in the hostile environs of the "in itself." Like the figure in Plato's cave, the philosopher is the loner, the critic, the gadfly who, even for the sake of those who reject him, must criticize the prevailing institution, be it the human aspects of the Omrch, or the body politic. In the

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language of Santayana, "The true philosopher, who is one not chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the wine' press alone. He may indeed flourish like the baytree in a grateful environment, but more starved or fed by the accidents of fortune, he must find his essential life in his own ideal" (The Life of Reason, from excerpts contained in Reflections on Man, p. 480).

The true philosopher must question everywhere and every· thing, including himself and his principles. As Lippmann says, "The role of philosophers is rarely, no doubt, creative. But it is critical, in that they have a deciding influence in determin· ing what may he believed, how it can be believed, and what cannot be believed. The philosophers, one might say, stand at the crossroads. While they may not cause the traffic to move, the} can stop it and start it, they can direct it one way or the other" (p.l78).

A man of ethics, the philosopher must serve as the private and public conscience of his culture, for he has helped to shape that culture and to develop it. In addition, be must urge all to transcend it. Through conscious reflections on that culture, he must articulate what others sense and live, but are themselves unable to express.

With the playwright Miguel de Unamuno, the philosopher must distinguish between fascination and understanding, realiz. ing that we can understand something less and less and yet have it fascinate us more and more.

Philosophy can help contemporary man discover who he is, living in a world that threatens to engulf him and depersonalize him, reducing him to a statistical phenomenon. It must expose to man the fallaciousness of being considered only according to a non-existent law of averages, much as an actuarial table predicting longevity to an individual. Life is not statistical, although it can be so manipulated. Life is existential. And all life, no matter how misshapen, how deformed, how deprived or depraved-all life is a victory over nothingness.

Everything in life is exceptional. To speak of the "average" or the "typical" or the "usual case" is to speak of an abstrac·

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lion, of a logical construct superimposed upon the real, enabling us to name it, to speak about it, in short, to do everything but live it. We find such logical construct everywhere, in science, with its mathematical models, in language, with its labeled parts of speech, in moral casuistry, with its ethical cases. (This latter point is the germinal insight of the noted Louvain theologian, Louis Moden, who argues for the open acknowledgement of what has always been quietly accepted in fact-a Christian situation ethics. cf. Sin, Liberty and Law, New York, esp. c. 3, pp. 73-144).

DOORWAY TO TRANSCENDENCE

Philosophy can offer man hope, and hope is the doorway to transcendence, pointing as it does to what is ever beyond itself. Philosophy can make conscious man self conscious and God conscious. It can reveal to him that through intellect, but especially through will, he is the being who can always become more than what he is. (Chesterton puts this well, when in speaking of the birth of a new human, describes this emergence, not merely as that of another intellect, but as the eruption of a new will in the world.)

It is unfortunate that while we recognize at one level the ability of man to become more than what he is-to see that his being lies in his becoming-we refuse to acknowledge this fact at a different level. Behaviourism, for example, which implicitly insists on man's inability to become something more, has been repudiated at the theoretical level for nearly fifty years, but in practice, it still remains the basic thesis of such mundane things as college entrance exams, which tell the nervous candidate, "You can not become more than what your past and present reveal."

Man can always do more than he believes himself capable of doing. This is true physiologically, phychologically, and ontologically. This ability is revealed, as man's nature is revealed, most often in times of crisis. Just as the body collates its inner resources to give additional adrenalin to man, helping him to meet and conquer a crisis, so psychologically, there

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is discovered a psychic energy, an elan vital which rises to the foreground helping us encounter our moment of truth. These may well be moments of grace, which if operative at the spiritual level, a fortiori must manifest itself on the material plane as well.

There is then a unity, and with that unity, a reciprocity between contemporary man and philosophy. It is the kind of reciprocity exhibited in giving and receiving. As the psychologist Eric Fromm points out, ''The teacher is ¡ taught by his students, the actor is stimulated by his audience, the psychoanalyst is cured by his patient-provided they do not treat others as objects, but are related to each other genuinely and productively" (The Art of Loving, New York, 1956, p. 21).

So it is with philosophy and contemporary man. Saint Exupery touches this theme when describing friendship in his memorable The Little Prince. You will recall the little prince meeting the fox, asking how he can make friends. To this the fox replies. "You must tame them."

The Prince questions, "What does that mean, 'tame'?"

Replies the fox: "It means to establish ties. . . . If you tame me then we shall need each other. To me you will be unique in all the world. . . . If you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. . . . One only understands the things one has tamed" (The Little Prince, New York, 1943, pp. 66-67).

Philosophy then, like contemporary man, is the quest for unity. This is to say that both are the quest for completion and perfection. But it is not the unity or perfection in which the heterogeneity of experience is made into an undifferentiated and homogeneous mass; rather it is a unity carefully collated into a meaningful yet diversified and pluralistic whole. It is in moving toward this whole that the parts of philosophy and the parts of life take on their fullest meaning.

We see this exemplified in a number of areas: the parts of grammar make sense only in the whole fabric of language; the proper positioning of hands, feet, and body in golf are only meaningful if seen in the larger perspective of the game-and

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seen by the partrcrpant rather than the spectator; the tuning up of various musical instruments is tolerable only in anticipation of the symphony to follow; the stories and midrash of the Bible take on significance only in the context of Salvation History.

In thus approaching the whole, the Weltanschauung sought by philosophy and by man, we enlarge and extend immediacy, gathering within it the world of the other, thereby establishing no longer mere unity, but community. Thus, to be a philosopher is to be on the way. And this is what it is to be a man.

What then is the relationship between contemporary man and philosophy? Why, it is a relationship of identity, for it is man who stands-under philosophy (giving it support) and philosophy which under-stands man. Who is contemporary man, then? He is the search for truth; he is the love of wisdom.

He is philosophy personified!

\.

APOLOGETICS SURVEY

_Academic Jreedom and

~o/ogelicj

I

No single area of Roman Catholic systematic theology has undergone such dramatic changes as has that of Apolo路 getics or Fundamental Theology. This first paper of the current series surveys major problems confronted in both practical and scientific apolo路 getics.

Js

PRACTICAL

APOLOGETICS DEAD?

There has always been con路 A survey of fusion about the precise scope problems in both of Apologetics, a great deal practical and of which bas been of a semanscientific apologetics tic nature. Thus, apologetics, and the most pressing fundamental theology, and problem of polemics have often been used academic freedom. interchangeably. In their Theological Dictionary Karl Rah路 ner and Herbert Vorgrimler + tend to equivalate the terms apologetics and fundamental GEORGE K. MALONE theology, distinguishing two different senses or usages. + In their first sense, apologetics deals with the "pre- , ambles of faith," attempting to "make the fact of Christian revelation logically and morally credible for free, responsible spiritual man without forcing or attempting to force his assent."

The Rahner-Vorgrimler distinction of apologetics in this sense follows the traditional division of subject matter into Revela169

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tion and the Church. This traditional treatment of revelation seeks to establish the nature, possibility, and knowability of divine revelation. It studies the possible forms of such revelation and the historical structure and proofs for the fact of Christian revelation. The traditional treatment of the Church seeks to establish the permanence of this revelation through the establishment of the Church. Studies then investigate the historical marks of the Church and its structure as an historical society.

In Rahner-Vorgrimler's second sense, apologetics deals with "reflection as to why and how such a thing as theology exists • at all." In other words, it includes the efforts by which systematic theology seeks to "explain and substantiate itself." Apologetics here seems to occupy a position in relation to systematic theology which is analogous to that occupied by epistemology in relation to systematic philosophy. In this second sense apolo· getics deals with such questions as theological method, academic freedom, theological certitude, and biblical;systematic magisterial relationships.

SEMANTICS

To avoid semantic squabbles over "essential" defiinitions, let us therefore stipulate these usages for this and following articles: by "scientific apologetics," we shall mean the scientific establishing of principles pertaining to Rahner-Vorgrimler's first sense; by "practical apologetics," we shall mean the practical pastoral application and adaptation of those principles established by scientific apologetics; finally, by "fundamental theology," we shall mean apologetics in Rahner-Vorgrimler's second sense. Such terminology is consonant with current usage.

Note that practical apologetics is not to be confused with the notion of polemics. A case at hand is that of James A. Mara, S.J., whose remarks reflect a confusion frequently found in the pastoral community. In discussing the question of au· thority in the Church, Mara quite aptly distinguishes three levels of attitude-those of polemics (combat), apologetics (conversion), and dialogue (partnership). But he then proceeds to identify apologetics with feelings of victimhood, boredom,

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resentment, and bitterness. In so doing he practically equates apologetics with polemics. "Therefore," he asserts, "dialogue is outside the situation where polemics and apologetics can exist" (Current Trends in Theology, ed. Wolf and Schall, 1965, p. 156). Such a negative understanding is simply out of date auJ reminds one of the nineteenth century, when Schleiermacher dismissed practical apologetics as a "clerical practice," an endeavor to bring others into the community (Brief Outline, n. 39), and when such American apologists as Carroll, Gallitzin, and Brownson adopted a bellicose and extremely defensive posture.

Two years earlier Gregory Baum, O.S.A., had outlined a much more delicate balance between apologetics and polemics (The Catholic Quest for Christian Unity, 1962). In this study Baum underscored the dangers of adopting a purely polemical apologetic approach (sometimes referred to by manuals as "negative" apologetics) and also of allowing an apologetical approach to permeate all of systematic theology. In this approach one's primary goal might become the refutation of opponents rather than the seeking of truth. But, admitting these dangers, he insisted upon the need of non-polemically examining and vindicating the various signs which God has given as guarantee and testimony of his self-revelation. Apologetics is thus necessary not only for the sake of unbelievers, but also for the sake of "believing Christians who seek a deeper understanding of divine revelation and its relationship to human knowledge" (pp. 112-113).

The task of practical apologetics is therefore not that of ' polemics-it is to adapt and to apply for believer and unbeliever alike a scientific exposition of the faith-preambles. It is a quest for a balance between rationalism and irrationalism, for a confrontation of people with the external testimony which conveys the object of faith. Briefly, its function is, in the words of Bouillard, to show that "Christianity is the historical de- v termination of man's relationship to the Absolute."

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CHICAGO STUDIES THE DEATH OF THE "TRADITIONAL APPROACH"

For many years manuals of practical apologetics presented what had seemed to be a cut and dried case for Christianity in general and for Roman Catholicism in particular. God existed and divine revelation, they argued, was possible. The fonr Gospels were reliable since they were authentic, substantially unchanged since their origin, and written by trustworthy authors.

In them Christ claimed to be a divine legate, proved this claim by miracles and prophecies, and established a religious society to carry on his work. Finally, they concluded, the Roman Catholic Church was shown by threefold demonstration to be structurally identical with that society (via primatus, notarum, empirica).

Parenthetically let us note here and insist upon the different approaches and methods involved in scientific and in practical apologetics. In treating Revelation and the Church, the scientific apologist can presuppose the existence of God and the knowability of truth, while the practical apologist cannot. Thus when we discuss the following two problem areas, we are speaking of the practical apologist and the adaptations which he must make in presenting the faith-preambles to the here and now (U.S.A. in the late sixties) inquirer.

Since the traditional case has begun to appear far from clear, there are many today who feel that any form of practical apologetics is either impossible or at least undesirable. Two factors have contributed mightily to this changed attitude: biblical studies and historical certitude. While seemingly disparate, there two areas are in fact closely interrelated. We shall, after considering them individually, correlate them as they affect the work of the practical apologist.

BIBLICAL STUDIES

The practical apologist in his pastoral ministry works with the Gospels as he has them today, since this inquirer reads these words in these books in this Bible. Of what value are there books today? In proving the "historicity" of the Gospels, the mutual interrelationship of the qualities of authenticity,

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integrity, and trustworthiness was so intimate that denial or serious doubt of any one of the three caused the entire logical structure to totter. But today at least three questions have arisen which the practical apologist must answer to preserve the traditional approach. We feel that he cannot. l. What precisely were. the modifications of these Gospels by their translator-editors? 2. If he does not know the various sources or the editors, how can the apologist claim that the Gospels as we have them today were written by honest men who knew whereof they wrote (testes scientes et veraces) ? 3. Since the Gospel authors and editors were writing from a faith-context, must not their Christ-image have been determined, or at least colored, by that faith? How then can the apologist claim any sort of true objectivity for them? An even more fundamental question underlies these problems. Can any true certitude be derived from historical investigation?

HISTORICAL CERTITUDE

The problems facing the practical apologist here arise from both scientific and popular sources. On the scientific level, historians have long been vexed by the epistemological problems of their own profession. Thus, while asserting that the his· torian's goal is to explain things exactly as they happened, Samuel Eliot Morison went on to declare that the historian's "own sense of values will enter into his own selection and arrangement of facts. It goes without saying that complete, 'scientific' objectivity is unattainable by the historian. His 'choice of facts to he recorded, his distribution of emphasis among them, his sense of their significance and relative pro· portion, must be governed by his philosophy of life' (Com· ford). No historian of my generation has ever pretended other· wise. Certain mid-nineteenth century historians fancied that they could be as objectively scientific about the multitudinous, un· refractory materials of human history as a physiologist should be (but seldom is) in describing muscular reactions. But none of .these, from Ranke down, if pressed, would have denied that their philosophy of life influenced, if it did not dictate, their

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selection, emphasis, and arrangement" (American Historical Review 56, p. 263) .

On the popular level, these problems are illustrated by the assassination of President Kennedy as studied by various in路 vestigators. At first Buchanan and Joesten contended that Ken路 nedy had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. Then the Warren Commission's Report, with 26 volumes of evidence, denied the existence of conspiracy and asserted the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald alone. Finally, hooks by Epstein, Lane, Weisberg, Sauvage, and Popkin have attacked the Commission itself for incompetently evaluating its own evidence. In the light of all these conflicting claims and counter-claims, a college student recently complained, "Here you have a tragic event of supreme importance observed by countless witnesses, recorded on film, investigated by the country's finest legal minds, and still you can't really he sure. I'll never again he certain of anything I read in a history hook!" " Now to admit the perplexity arising from biblical studies and a general lack of historical certitude is not to deny the historicity of the Gospels, hut is to assert that they have, on the practical level, rendered the traditional historical ap路 proach large! y meaningless to the sophisticated inquirer of today.

THE FUNCTION AND DESIRABILITY OF "PROOF"

Practical apologetics traditionally attached great importance to "proofs" as establishing the faith-preambles. There are two problem areas here.

In the first place, against Tillich and Brunner some Protes. tants have cited Barth and Bultmann as rejecting all forms of apologetic activity. Basically, the contention of this school is that Christian revelation is above all human criteria, stand路 ards, or testing and that an individual person either hears the summons of God in the kerygma or he does not. If the person does, he enters into a new self-understanding, which is its own verification and is consequently unverifiable. If he does not, then human reason is of no avail. "Your so-called preambles of faith," remarked an evangelical clergyman recently, "cannot

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he made a logical 'middle term' leading me to God. My response to God's word is deeply personal-it is not the result of some clever dialectical reasoning process!"

The second area is closely related to the total rejection of apologetics. How has the Roman Catholic apologist traditionally understood the very nature of proof? In practice it has ordi· narily connoted a line of reasoning which ineluctably leads from the known to the unknown, from the admitted to the not· as-yet admitted. Moreover it seems to imply a peculiar "suasive· ness" in its very nature. For all practical purposes the apologist seems to be saying, "I shall guide you from the known to the unknown. Of course, this means that I already know where we are going and you do not." This in t.;m is tantamount to an implication that the apologist is more intelligent than his listener or at least to a smug implication of some ignorance on the listener's part which the apologist is about to dispel. What we are asserting here is that the traditional notion of "proof' is most undesirable when the apologist is dealing with an intellectual peer.

Note that we are frequently using the terms "connote" and "imply." Why so? Because some would describe these notions as an inadequate and inaccurate description of "proof." Brown· son, for instance, described proof simply as a means of re· moving obstacles to assent, and not as a means of convincing others. Now it is true that there are differing abstract concepts about the nature of proof and its proper function. However, we are dealing here with the ordinary understanding of proof as employed by the practical apologist-and in this context we contend that it has had, and does have, the pejorative im· plications described above. We contend moreover that until such implications are removed practical apologetics must remain moribund. · PRACTICAL APOLOGETICS:

A

NEW LIFE?

Granted these serious problems--doubts about historical certitude in general and especially those arising from biblical studies, doubts about the very function of apologetics itselfis any form of practical apologetics possible or desirable in these

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United States of the late sixties? Our answer is a firm Yes to both questions. For the very presence of such a multiplicity of serious questions indicates that some rational justification of one's faith-preambles is necessary. To ignore the existence of such questions is to revert to fideism, while to state that they cannot be answered is to fall into agnosticism. A balance must be sought, one which is adapted to the here-and-now man of today. In seeking this balance we suggest several principles and a specific avenue of approach. Since each man's understanding and adaptation of the faith-preambles is intimately personal, we suggest these principles merely as general guidelines.

In considering those who do not profess belief in God, it is essential for the apologist to distinguish between various forms of "atheism." That the problem of God's existence is a real one is clear from Rodney and Stark's Religion and Society in Tension, whose admittedly small random samplings indicate wide doubts and uncertainties even among professed Christian 1 believers. An inquiring college senior complained this year, "I thought that the priest giving the inquiry series was pretty cool. But then he started with Abraham's convenant with God. Hell, I don't even know whether God exists, much less Abraham!"

In Asia, Africa, and continental Europe, communistic atheism founded upon dialectical materialism is undoubtedly quite important. But the American apologist is ill-advised to adapt his peresentation of the faith-preambles to this sort of person.

It is for this reason that such books as The Future of Belief (L. Dewart) and The Pastoral Approach to Atheism ed. K. Rahner, S.J.), while excellent in themselves, are largely irrelevant to the contemporary American practical apologist.

American and English-speaking philosophy at this date still thrust in the direction of analysis, pragmatism, and process.

One needs only look at the catalogues of British and American philosophy departments to realize this. It was in this context that Michael Novak commented about Dewart's work: "Contemporary philosophical issues are discussed in quite

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other language, and according to quite other rules, than Dewart yet employs. The truly grievous intellectual wound in contemporary American Christianity is that it is still neglecting the wisdom of the Anglo-American secular university. That wisdom is not the wisdom of Barth or of Bonhoeffer, not of Rahner or of Kung, not of Aquinas or of Teilhard. The hard headed Anglo-American philosopher hankers after rigorous physics and mathematics. Heidegger, to him, is a muddle and Marcel is an amateur" ("Belief and Mr. Dewart," Commonweal, 3 February 1967, p. 487)."

For the American apologist therefore, any discussion of God and the other preambles which does not recognize Wittgenstein, James, and Whitehead is destined to be an intellectual failure.

DISILLUIONMENT WITH

Goo

It is one thing to deal with the atheist, quite another to deal with the person for whom "God" has lost all meaning.

In this latter category we would single out two types of individuals, who are in a way representative of all who find themselves disillusioned.

First of all, there are many younger Jewish persons who are extremely disillusioned with the concept of a God who is omniscient, omnipresent, and who responds to human prayers.

"Six million Holy Innocents are massacred," said one Jewish medical student, "and the Lord God of hosts hears their prayers?

Oh, come on, Father, you're too much. You're worse than our rabbi!" This sort of dispair is echoed by young Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, who asserts, "God cannot create without creating evil. This evil is not overcome in an earthly Jerusalem or in a new aeon. It is overcome only when we return to the nothing-ness that is both our source and our end. The price we pay for existence is pain, suffering, anxiety, hopelessness, and evil" (America and the Future of Theology, 1967, p. 37).

Secondly, there are many young people such as are found in the American "hippie" subculture, who are honestly seeking God, but feel that the organized churches have alienated them by "merely offering them activities to keep them off the

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streets." Moreover, MDT, LSD, and other hallucinogens are causing a new type of religious problem here, in that they frequently afford an experience in many ways similar to that experienced by the "classic" mystics {cf. Jubilee, June 1967, pp. 8·17). "On my trips," said one college sophomore, "I ex· perience something greater than myself. I can't describe it.

Maybe you'd call it God. But the end result is that if I should ever pray now I'll mean it because I have felt and know this Being."

In talking with such young people, the practical apologist cannot but reflect, "How do the ontological argument, the q.uinq.ue viae, and the categorical imperative fit in here?"

ADAPTATION TO ECUMENISM

In a recent ecumenical dialogue, two Jewish rabbis had gathered with two Roman Catholic and two Protestant theolo· gians. When one of the rabbis was asked why comparatively few Jewish leaders participated in such conversations, he replied, "Many of our brothers still harbor a suspicious feeling about the entire ecumenical movement. Many of them still feel that it is a cleverly disguised means of seeking our conversion to Christianity. If I personally felt this, I would not be here tonight!" The two Roman Catholics quietly demurred, denying any such motivation. But one of the Protestants spoke up, "Gentlemen, we must make a distinction here. I would say between immediate and remote motivation. Why am I meet· ing with you tonight? Immediately, only because I wish to learn about you and your beliefs and to tell you about my· self and my own beliefs. But ultimately I must confess as a Christian my fondest hope is that you would someday become a Christian also. Because as a Christian I do believe that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, truly the light of the world.

I do not come here to 'convert' you, but I would be false to myself if I did not hope and pray for your conversion."

This exchange is typical of many problems arising from ecumenism, ·especially those centering about conversion. That the flourishing of ecumenism has had a negative effect on

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conversions to Roman Catholicism no one can deny. On the theological level ecumenical theology has accelerated a trend which was already present ·in scientific apologetics-to develop the treatises on Revelation and the Church doctrinally, thus avoiding a heavily polemical approach. But the trend, though most welcome, has had the end result of pushing all practical apologetics off to the side, a tendency already evident in some textbooks and catechisms. Ironically, this is happening at the very time when more and more faith-problems are centering in the area of pre-evangelization, where practical apologetics is most needed (cf. A. Nebreda, Kerygma in Crisis?, 1965).

How is the apologist to adapt to ecumenism? He must, in forming his own pastoral synthesis, reconcile two concepts: 1) that the Church is not bound always and everywhere to pur· sue the making of converts with the same intensity (C. Pau· wels, "Ecumenical Theology and Conversions," The Thomis!

27 (1963), p. 585); and 2) that it is both right and in accord with the loftiest principles of ecumenism to present the faith and its confessional aspects even to the sincere participating Protestant who seeks information (Albert Cardinal Meyer, Lenten Pastoral of 1964, p. 34) .

SuGGESTED AVENUE oF APPROACH

The future of practical apologetics in this country lies in the approach suggested by Avery Dulles, S.J., in his Apolo· getics and the Biblical Christ (Newman, 1964), which had a somewhat mixed reception. Critical response was generally favorable, though some criticized what they considered the author's slighting of the Gospel's historicity and of the pro· bative value of miracles. But pastoral response has been rela· lively negligible. A random survey of twenty-six priests or· dained prior to 1961 (when the lectures were originally delivered in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) indicated that only four had read the book, while two others had heard of it and the other twenty had neither read it nor heard of it. The scientific aplogist pushes ahead, but for the practical apologist this remains a most significant book, even three years after its publication.

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Why this continued significance? Because Dulles raises the right questions for the American apologist and tries to answer them honestly in a manner adapted to today's unbeliever. The governing insight of the entire work is found in the introduction, where the author accurately and incisively describes the dif路 ference between the believer and the unbeliever in reading the Gospels. The believer reads the Gospels within the Church relying on all the positive helps afforded by his faith, under路 standing them in harmony with the entire Catholic community.

The unbeliever does not have these aids and consequently has serious problems. Nineteenth century historicism is, as we have seen, dead. And so the unbeliever asks, "What in these Gospels can I believe? What are they worth?"

It is here that Dulles makes his contribution to overcoming the apologist's "credibility gap." Let us honestly recognize the Gospels for what they are--confessional documents reflecting the faith of the community in which they were writen. Would this not destroy their historicity? It would not, for they do represent the faith of the early Christian community. We are thus thrust back to the latter part of the first century A.D. and have the faith路image which the first Christians had of Christ.

And, most important for the practical apologist, this cannot be historically gainsaid.

With this foundation established, the apologist can then proceed to explain why Roman Catholics hold a structural identity of their Church with the early Christian community.

Difficulties in this attempt will be discussed in our next study.

FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY: ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The most pressing problem facing systematic Roman Catho路 lie theology today is that of academic freedom. Although in practice this problem usually devolves around such specifics as birth control and the permanence of the marrige bond, the underlying question is one of principle, pertaining to the very structure of Roman Catholic theological enterprise itself. In

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the other problems cannot be solved until this structural difficulty is settled.

There is much confusion here. In a recent discussion of "Issues that Divide the Church" (Nmiorw.l Catholic Reporter, March 8, 1967), the participants-Bozell, Callahan, Dwyer, Greeley, Grennan, Hoyt, and Shuster-raised the qhestion well, but did not follow through on the key issue of ordinary noninfallible teaching. Consider the following exchange. Mr. Callahan said: "The question is how much of the teaching must one accept to be within the boundaries. Is it all or nothing, black or white? Or if you reject the teaching on birth control, are you out just as much as if you reject the divinity of Christ? I wouldn't see the two issues on a level of parity by any means."

Mr. Bozell responded: "My understanding is that your position is not only wrong, but the Church in one way or another has called it heresy-that is, that one who does not accept its teaching cannot consider himself in good standing."

We note here the shifting of the question from one of "heresy" to one of not being in "good standing" as a striking instance of confusion resulting from disuse of the theological qualification in religious discourse. The discussants were agreed that the Church could teach infallibly, but Mr. Callahan summed up the prevalent confusion very well asserting, "One of the problems with infallibility is for the individual Catholic to know infallibily that something has been spoken infallibly."

This is indeed one of the anomalies of Catholic theology-here is a Church which possesses the charism of infallibility and yet even to this day there is no listing of doctrines which this same Church has infallibly taught!

But while regretting this curious situation, we note that the focal point of difficulties with the Church's teaching au¡ thority concerns the ordinary magistery.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

A distinguished Lutheran theologian remarked earlier this year that his problems about the magistery were as follows.

The extraordinary infallible magistery of the Roman Pontiff

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posed no great problem for him since, in his opinion, such ex cathedra pronouncements were so rare that he could not consider them a true historical obstacle. But he asserted, he had read the document of Vatican II and, while he appreciated the change in tone and style from earlier magisterial pronouncements, he felt that the Church was still repeating its teaching about the ordinary magistery. That is, Humani Generis had declared that a true internal religious assent was due to the ordinary noninfallible teachings of the pope. What then, he asked, did Vatican II teach about this same point? The Constitution Lumen Gentium declares: "Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matter 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 of soul. This religious submission of will and of mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching authority 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 magistery is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely ad· hered to, according to his manifest mind and will" (25).

In other words, the Lutheran theologian continued, despite your change in tone you are still demanding the same thinga true internal assent must be given to these authentic "non· infallible" teachings. Some Roman theologians have told me that one was free to ignore these teachings. But I do not believe them, since the Roman Church as a whole in the Council has taught that such assent is still due.

Here then is the tension area. The true internal, albeit con· ditional assent postulated by Humani Generis is not only re· peated in Lumen Gentium, but its application is explicitly ex· tended to include the ordinary magistery of the episcopal college throughout the world insofar as that college maintains unity among themselves and with the pope. What of the individual theologian in his relation to this ordinary teaching au-

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thority? Two recent incidents illustrate how pressmg this question is.

DAYTON

In relation to recent problems in Dayton, Jesuit educator Neil McCluskey declared, ''There is no more academic justifi¡ cation for the entry by a local bishop or provincial into the university discipline of theology than there is for the local mayor or governor to intrude into the field of political science. . . .

Whatever the need that the bishop or provincial may have to exercise vigilance over the purity of Christian doctrine taught in secondary schools and parochial schools, the autonomy of the Catholic university precludes such treatment. Theology is not Christian doctrine."

What of this assertion? From the professional educator's point of view, the answer is simple-no outside interference with a purely academic matter. But to the theologian this is a gross oversimplification. For, in the words of Paul Tillich, "Participation in a religious community is a presupposition of all theology. You have to be within the circle of a concrete religion in order to interpret it existentially."

With regard to McCluskey's remarks, two counterindications come immediately to mind: In the first place, within the exis¡ tential circle of this religion known as Roman Catholicism, the bishop of the diocese has certain functions. As shepherd of his flock in hierarchical communion with the head and members of the apostolic college, he is the teacher of that flock {Lumen Gentium 25, and Pastorale Munus 12). Now in the concrete this theologizing occurs at this university in this diocese at this time. To deny the competence of this ordinary seems to go counter to the teachings of Vatican II. Secondly, although the individual bishops do not enjoy the charism of infallibility, they can nevertheless proclaim Christ's doctrine infallibly, even when they are dispersed around the world. Vatican II mentions three conditions: unity among themselves and with the pope; authentic teaching on a matter of faith or morals; concurrence in a single viewpoint which must be held conclusively. Now if these three conditions are veri-

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lied in a specific case of theological teaching, the local bishop not only can, but in fact must guarantee the teaching of this doctrine to his flock.

Taken by themselves, therefore, McCluskey's remarks are nothing more than theological fantasy, for they ignore the structure of systematic Roman Catholic theology, in which the ordinary universal teaching of the episcopal college is one of the data with which this theology works.

RocK It was recently reported that the bishop of Little Rock, Arkansas, had suspended a seminary professor, Father James F. Drane, from his priestly ministry as a result of a series of articles on birth control written for the Arkansas Gazette. It is reported that Bishop Fletcher bad asserted that the Drane articles "teach and defend doctrine forbidden by the Holy See," and that they leave the author, "to say the least, suspect of heresy."

In both the Drane articles and the reported comments of the bishop, one again senses a certain vague inconsistency.

On the one hand, to state that papal infallibility will finally be "laid to rest only by some obviously fallible solemn pro¡ nouncement" is hardly consistent with the teachings of Vatican II. On the other hand, to state simply that Drane's statements were "certainly hazardous to make and should not be made without the approval of the bishop" is not quite the same as making one "suspect of heresy."

Once again we have returned to the matter of theological qualifications. In practice a theologian is bound to assign to any given theological proposition~octrinal or moral-the lowest qualification consonant with Catholic teaching. One may not call dogma that which is merely common Catholic teaching, and vice versa. In the matter of birth control, the theologian is dealing neither with free opinion nor with dogma, but with value-judgment which is at least doctrina catholica-that is, authentic and non-infallible teaching; Can it be changed? Yes. Has it been changed? No. Will it be changed? Possibly. In the LITTLE

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meantime, what can be taught? To the non-professional theologian, nothing other than the teachings of Pius XI and Pius XII as repeated by Paul VI. To go counter to this with the non-professional is not to be a heretic, but it is to leave the sphere of systematic Catholic teaching.

Is there then no freedom for the Roman Catholic theologian?

Is he bound merely to repeat and to parrot the teachings of his predecessors and contemporaries and simply to echo even the non-infallible pronouncements of the magistery? Assuredly not! In an earlier study (Chicago Studies, 1964) we tried to establish sound theological norms according to which the professional theologian could express dissent from authentic non-infallible teaching.

An interesting application of the norms there laid down was made at last year's convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America by Father Charles Curran. In discussing the objectively grave matter of masturbation, Curran presented a splendidly researched paper with the following purpose: "The purpose of the present paper is to argue that the act of masturbation does not always involve grave matter. Note well that the paper does not try to prove that masturbation is not sinful or that masturbation can never involve grave sin. The scope of the discussion is very limited: masturbation is not an action which is ex toto genere suo grave" ( CTSA Proceedings, 1966, p. 95).

We note that the conclusion would not be considered traditionally "orthodox" in that it does not agree with the historically common teaching of moralists. Yet we also note that it was presented simply as an "exploratory discussion," one presented to his peers and open to their criticism and questions, one published not in a popular newspaper but rather in the official proceedings of this learned society of professional theologians. In brief, Father Curran's conclusions were presented in a manner which could never be considered "rash," "temerarious," or "hazardous."

With regard, then, to the Drane affair, what can be said?

If a man goes directly counter to "Catholic teaching" and does

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not sincerely adhere to the judgments of the Roman Pontiff, the bishop is surely justified in removing him, if the theologian is dealing with non-professionals. Is such removal wise or desirable? Since this is a prudential judgment determined by local conditions, it is absurd for an outsider unfamiliar with those conditions to take sides.

ROMAN CATHOLICISM CONFESSIONAL

In both these areas--practical apologetics and academic freedom-there runs a common strain. Unlike various denominations of the Free Church tradition, Roman Catholicism involves a credal confession with certain intellectual and personal commitments. Together with Lutherans and Anglicans, with Eastern Orthodox and Jews, the Roman Catholic must bear, profess, and defend his confession. Admittedly, he looks at times with envy at his Free Church brother, who can be so much more freewheeling in his whole approach to apologetics and academic freedom. We do not talk here of "sin" or of "heresy," but simply of the historical fact which is Roman Catholicism. To talk as if there were no reasoned explanation of our faith-preambles or as if the Catholic theologian enjoyed unlimited academic freedom is surdy intellectually dishonest.

Sixty years ago, when an impoverished mechanic was tinkering with an internal combustion engine for a horse¡ less carriage, he did not dream that he was engineering a social revolution. Henry Ford, as he worked in that Michigan barn, was simply trying to develop a reliable engine for a simple autocar. Nevertheless, more than an automobile came out of that barn.

An outline Our mass production, inter¡ of new programs changeable parts, suburbia, of religious education texts and much of what we call the incorporating the insights twentieth century can in a true of Vatican II. sense turn to Henry and call him "grandpa." About the same time, the Wright bothers at Kitty Hawk pushed the first airplane off the ground. That + plane flew but a few hundred feet; nevertheless, it launched GERARD P. WEBER man into the air. When within the next few years the astronauts land on the moon, the + spirits of Orville and Wilber will be standing next to them surprised and bewildered by what they wrought.

Scoffers at Henry Ford and the early automobile cried in derision, "Get a horse." Pedants and preachers looking at the efforts of the Wright brothers solemnly assured the nation 187

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in the first decade of this century that, if God intended men to fly, he would have given them wings. But the automobile and the airplane were not stopped by scoffers. They have steadily developed during the past sixty years, changing life, customs, culture, and the very mode of thinking of modern man.

Ten years ago, John XXIII pulled aside the drapes of the Vatican which had shut the church off from the twentieth century and ordered that the windows be opened. He too started a revolution, a religious revolution. Unless God gave him a special revelation, we can be sure that he did not know how this revolution would end. Just as the new $14,000 Thunderbird with built-in TV bears little resemblance to Henry's first auto, so too the Church of the twenty-first century will bear little resemblance to that of the sixth decade of the twentieth century.

Even though scoffers stand on the side-lines and solemnly proclaim that the Church does not change and that in a short time things will return to normal, we have- to face the fact that the windows have been opened and that the gale sweeping in through them will prevent them from ever being closed again.

The priest who takes the time to open the heavy drapes shutting off the rectory from the parish sees many disturbing things. Catholics who have spent an incredible amount of energy and money building up a Catholic school system are taking their children out of the crowded classrooms or are at least seriously thinking about doing so. These people are not indifferent Catholics who really are not too concerned about religious education. They often are the elite of the parish, those who have been active in Catholic affairs and truly concerned about the Church. Indeed, in one parish a group of such people who cannot communicate with their pastor and who cannot put their children in the overcrowded and rigid Catholic school or in the poorly organized CCD classes have organized an "underground" instruction course.

In these parishes, good Catholics, daily communicants, seriously ask the priest to explain the need for confession in their lives. They will admit that it has been a year or more since they went to confession, and many a priest to whom

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they talk will have to admit that he has not gone much more often.

The changes in the liturgy have satisfied very few. Many do not like the changes, and those who do like them want a much more radical rethinking of the concept of liturgical celebration.

Parish councils of people who want to have a decisive voice in parish affairs are in the embryonic stage in many parts of the country.

Staff meetings of the priests of a parish are eroding the old pastor¡asistant relationship and bringing into being a true brotherly sense of cooperation. The Association of Chicago Priests and similar organizations are hound to have an effect upon the bishop-priest relationship and on all lay-clerical relationships.

The winds of change swirl around us. We can bury our heads and hope that when we pull them out of the sand we shall find that the nineteen-sixties have been a bad dream.

We can bemoan the changes and, like Canute, try to hold back the tide, or we can welcome the fresh air brought into the Church by Vatican II and try to promote the religious revolution started by John XXIII. Two MAJOR PROBLEMS The parish priest faces two major problems in promoting the changes. The first is how to make the changed thinking and attitudes of the post-conciliar Church meaningful and spiritually revitalizing to the adult of his parish, and the second is how to prepare children-our future adult Christians-to live comfortably and effectively in the Church which is evolving. For instance, the Catholic of the last half of the twentieth century cannot be nourished by the Baltimore Cathechism. No one can look into a crystal ball and discover the best way to give religious education today. However, we do know that, if the Catholic school is to continue to have a reason to exist, that reason must he found in the excellence of its religious education. The pastor and his fellow priests must understand what is happening in the fie!<! of religious education. They need a

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mind open to expermentation coupled with a willingness to change and to accept the failures as well as the successes of the new efforts at religious education.

As yet, the efforts to help adults assimilate and make their own the ideas and attitudes of Vatican II are inadequate, sporadic, embryonic, and chaotic. The efforts to help the children become good post-conciliar Catholics are much more developed. We in the United States are fortunate because we are not restricted by a national catechism. We have the freedom to approach religious education in various ways. At present, four new programs of religious texts are coming onto the market. Each of these programs is basically different. The time when all religion texts explained the same catechism questions and approached the presentation of the Word of God in the same basic way is past.

The parish priest must know and understand the philosophy behind the religious element in the program used in his school.

No longer can he walk into a class, ask the children what they are studying, and then give a pious little talk drawn from his seminary theological background. He needs to know not only whaJ is being presented in the course, but how it is being presented. Otherwise, he just wastes the time of the teacher and the children.

THE WoRD AND WoRSHIP PROGRAM

The Word and Worship elementary school Program from Benziger Brothers has its own particular thrust and method.

First of all, its basic method and philosophy were worked out by active parish priests in conjunction with teaching sisters.

The priests kept asking the question, "How can we help the children develop into the kind of Catholics we need in our modern parishes?" They had seen enough mute, blindly obedient and ineffective Catholics, who were wrapped up in their own personal quest for holiness, to know that a different kind of religious education was needed. They also had years of ex· perience working with educated, dedicated, and active Catho· lies. This experience influenced the methodology of the pro·

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gram. For example, from the experience with CFM, YCW, and Cana groups, they realized that free, frank discussion was one of the most effective means of bringing about a meaningful change in the lives of people. As a result, the Word and Worship Program is built around small groups and class discussions from the earliest years.

The teaching sisters have contributed deep insights into the psychology of the children and of their learning processes.

Tired of the old, complete, and complicated lessons plans, they evolved a simple lesson outline which gives the teacher the freedom she needs to be a vital, living witness to the faith and to teaching according to her talents, insights, and convictions.

The most basic change indicated by the Word and Worship Program can be summed up in one word, personalism. The faith is approached not as a series of propositions to be understood and accepted, but rather as an interpersonal experience between the child and the Persons of the Trinity. Thus the Creed is explored by the children and the teacher not as a series of articles of faith to be believed but as the summary of the loving action of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, trying to draw men into their ambiant love. The sacraments are explained as a series of encounters between the loving Christ and his brothers by which they are gradually transformed into his likeness.

No more is the stress placed on the conditions for valid and licit administration of the sacraments. The stress is on the effects of the sacraments in the life of the Christian. Along with the "ex opere operato" effect, the very important "ex opere operantis" effects which depend upon the faith, love, and sincerity of the Christian are stressed.

This personalism is the opposite of the religious individualism which permeated the older religious texts. From the first grade, the child is taught that he finds God and serves him through other people. His basic response to God is not the number of prayers or ejaculations he says, nor even the number of Masses he attends, but the love, concern, and interest he has for other people.

The Constitution on the Church opened the door once again

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to an understanding of the Church as a brotherhood, as a community of the people of God. In the past, the external, hierarchial structure of the Church had to be stressed in order to prepare the child to live in a world of Catholic-Protestant antagonism. Today, as a result of the ecumenical movement, we have to prepare children to understand, appreciate, and work with people of other faiths but without losing their com¡ plete dedication to the Catholic faith. A true ecumenical spirit necessitates a reappraisal of our approach to the doctrine of the Church. The Holy Spirit works where he wills, helping men of all faiths to seek the kingdom of God and in fact to find places in it, even though they do not profess membership to the Catholic Church.

The Constitution on the Church as it permeates Catholic thinking is bound to change parish structures as we know them.

The parish is a family, but now too many people see it as a family of small irresponsible children guided by a wise, all¡ knowing, and loving father, the pastor. The parish is a family, but a family of brothers who serve one another and who work hand-in-hand with each other to build up the body of Christ.

Our children need to be trained in this idea of cooperation and service. From their earliest years, they must realize that they have a responsible place in the family of God. RESPONSIBILITY AND SANCTITY

The Constitution on the Church in the Modem World is based on the personal responsibility every Catholic, as a mem¡ her of the Church, must feel towards making the world a better place in which to live. No longer can the Christian say that true sanctity lies in fleeing from the world. It lies rather in his taking responsibility, in as far as he is capable, for the course of human history.

The personalistic approach also determines what material is to be presented and how it is to be given to the children.

In the older books, the inner logic of the doctrine determined the starting point of a program and how the material was to be unveiled to the children. Thus, we started with "De Deo

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Uno," then "De Deo Trino," then went on to the tract on salvation, etc. The basic structure of the religious texts was always creed, sacraments, and commandments. The authors of the Word and Worship Program, with the aid of an educational psychologist, built the program around the needs and abilities of the children. All the necessary material is preseliled, but it is no longer presented in the order found in the theological texts.

The children of the primary grades cannot be expected to grasp such profound ideas as the Trinity, one God in three Divine Persons, or sin and salvation. However, they can respond to Christ as their loving Brother who is concerned about them and who helps them. They can respond to a loving and provident Father and to the Spirit who is Love dwelling within them.

Later when they are psychologically capable of understanding such concepts as nature and person, the Trinity can be explained to them. Children in first or second grades cannot grasp the concept of sin as total alienation from God. Sin is mentioned in the first three years, bnt when the children reach an age when they begin to understand personal relationships and when they can begin to comprehend what alienation means, then the concept of sin is developed in a truly meaningful way.

While it is absolutely necessary that the children learn certain information and facts about their religion, this memorization cannot be the final and total purpose of a religious education program. Much, much time must be spent helping the children develop positive Christian attitudes. They must discover how what they hear from the teacher has meaning in their own lives. This discovery proceeds at a different pace in each child and in each grade. If the teacher is concerned primarily with questions and answers, she will easily miss the most important aspect of religious instruction, namely that her role is to help the children realize that the values and ideas presented are important and valuable to them. To foster this realization, ideas must be presented time and time again under as many different guises as possible with the hope that each child will see that one or the other of these presentations of God's love makes sense to him.

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CHICAGO STUDIES TOWARD A PERSONAL SYNTHESIS

In the past, as we said, all the religious education texts had the same basic structure of creed, sacraments, and commandments. It is true that one aspect was stressed more than the others in each grade, but something of all three was presented in every grade. Each year the teacher hoped that the children would penetrate more deeply into the material. However, the children complained that they were getting the same old material year after year. Some years ago a study indicated that students in the eleventh and twelfth years of Catholic education actually regressed in their knowledge of the faith because they felt that they knew it all and that the same old stuff was repeatedly being taught. The Word and Worship Program tries to overcome this objection by building each year's work around a different skeleton. The same basic Christian attitudes and ideas are presented, but not in the same stylized form.

The first grade children begin by studying the man, Christ, who explains the Father to them. It was Christ the man who said to Phillip, "He who sees me, sees the Father." The second grade text helps the children realize the loving care which Christ the risen Lord has for them and how he sends his Spirit to help them love and serve the Father as he did. The third grade text is a simple response in love to that love which God has first shown us. The children discuss how they, as nine-and ten-year-olds, should love others. The Christian life is seen not as merely avoiding certain actions forbidden by law, but as responding to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as Christ, the saints and modern men have responded to his direction. In the fourth grade memorization begins with a study of the loving acts of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The fifth grade is basically a response to this love expressed by intelligent and deep participation in the liturgy, by private prayer, and by concern for others.

By the time the children are twelve years old, they are ready to begin forming a simple synthesis of their faith. In the sixth grade text this synthesis is built around the Scriptures. The children are helped to realize that the Bible is more than an

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arsenal of texts to be used against opponents of their point of view. They now are led to see it as a record of certain basic activities of¡ God in the lives of men, and that God is working the same way today as he did in the times of Moses and Abraham. The post-conciliar Catholic will more and more find his spirihlal nourishment in the Bible. Biblical theology is developing very rapidly. Bible devotions are replacing the older forms of extra-liturgical devotions. Books on the Bible are coming off the press at an astonishing rate and, of course, anyone who wants to participate intelligently in the liturgy needs to have a good background in Scripture. The children manifest a great eagerness to learn Scripture. Recently a teacher asked her class whether any of them had read ahead in the sixth grade Word and Worship text. She was astonished to discover that two-thirds of the class had already read the entire text of more than 500 pages.

The synthesis in the seventh grade text is built around the liturgy. Experience with the changes in the liturgy have already indicated that mere change of language or ceremonies has little salutary effect on the lives of people. For too long the external and peripheral aspects of the liturgy have been the only ones to be explained. What the Catholic needs is to know and to make his own the basic ideas upon which Christian worship is based. It makes little difference whether the priest has his back to the people or faces them as long as he and the people look upon the Mass merely as his action of worship. Participation will be poor and half-hearted as long as the people and priest do not understand that the Mass is a celebration by the entire community. Our people need to realize that the celebrations of the Eucharist and the other sacraments are community actions led by the priest, but not conducted exclusively by him. They must see that the liturgy is an interpersonal exchange between God and his people. They must realize that when they enter the Church they are not going to witness some magical rite, but that they must open their hearts and minds in love to God who is mainifesting his love to them in sign and symbol.

196

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Finally, the eighth grade synthesis is based on the Constitution on the Church and how the Christian is expected to live as a result of his incorporation into Christ. The student begins the year's work by looking at his parish to see what it is and what it does. Then he examines the role of the lay people, the priest, and the bishop in the community of God's people.

He explores the various biblical images by which the Council described the Church. He studies selected eras in Church history to learn how the Church has changed in the past, and to make him aware that it is changing now and that it must ever change if it is to be true to Christ.

One thing which seems to be very clear today is that the Catholic who turns to the priest for every decision affecting his moral life is fast passing into oblivion. Freedom, coupled with personal responsibility rather than the interpretations of canonists and moralists, is the norm more and more Catholics are beginning to follow. They realize that merely avoiding sin is not the type of morality Christ called for and that Christ has given us a living law of love, the Holy Spirit, as our guide rather than a written decalogue. In the eighth grade the children seriously examine their lives in the light of freedom and responsibility, of the moral teachings of the Church, and of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Instead of giving them a detailed plan for a Christian life, the teacher spends months with them discussing how they should act in order to be like Christ and how they sin when they fail to live a Christlike life.

The Word and Worship Program has another distinctive characteristic. It is definitely American. Hundreds of photographs illustrate the texts. These photos are not of old masters and European churches. They are scenes from modern American urban life. They show rich and poor, white and black, living in twentieth-century America. This American orientation is subtle. It is difficult to describe, but we have to admit that Americans react differently than do the French or the Germans.

Courses influenced by the French school of catechetics stress nature, looking at the flowers, walking in the country, the

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pastoral images of the Bible. Americans just do not think that way. Pastoral images such as the Good Shepherd mean little or nothing to the majority of Americans who have never seen a shepherd except on a TV screen. Kings and kingdoms are unreal to democratic Americans. Therefore, as much as possible, other comparisons and images are used to express the reality contained in the biblical notion of "king" and "kingdom."

The program is also American in that it treats present-day American problems of race, urban redevelopment, and automation so that the children are led to realize that religion is part of life.

Many good Catholics are confused today. All of a sudden, they have begun to think for themselves and some have come to the conclusion that many so-called Catholic customs and ideas are meaningless in modern society. Some, sad to say, in sincerity have left the Church. Others stay in, but only at the cost of much personal suffering. In the nineteenth century, the Church lost the working man in Europe because she was not attuned to his needs. In the twentieth century, she stands in danger of losing the well-educated unless she gives them the spiritual food they need and the freedom to act as responsible Christians. It is time for the Church to go into the Lord's treasure house of revelation and bring forth the new as well as the old to satisfy the needs of her members. The new religious education programs now being published are trying to do this. They are trying to prepare children to live in a Church opened to the modern world by John XXIII.

Saint Stephen Harding, founder of the Cistercian Order and one of the great figures of mediaeval monasticism, has been called an intellectual, a scholar, a puritan, a stoic-names he was not called in his own lifetime and names which do not describe him fairly or completely. That he was scholarly, there is no doubt, for he left us ample evidence of this.

That he was an intellectual is A contemplative also evident, though not in the genius has sense some attach to the word. significance today He was educated, well eduin re-evaluating cated; he was courteous, kindcontemplative life ly, gently in manner--characzn the Church teristics inherited from his Anglo-Saxon monastic heri+ tage. He had none of the mercurial extremes in his CLIFFORD STEVENS temperament for which his disciple, Saint Bernard of + Clairvaux, was noted, but he was fully as brilliant, endowed with qualities of leadership the Cistercian Order did not see again for another century, and was a man of pointed and impassioned convictions.

He was appreciated more in the generation that followed him than he would ever be again in Cistercian history. This generation described him as the dux et signifer ordinis, "the

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prince and standard-bearer of the Order." The title is not without significance.

THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

Stephen Harding was English, Saxon, from Dorsetshire in south England. Quiet, studious, gentle and affable, he was by nature fitted for a contemplative life, and his whole life was an impassioned search for a genuine contemplative existence. Exactly what contemplative life is is today the sub ject of warm and wide debate, but it is not very difficult to undestand what Stephen Harding sought in such a life. He sought for a life in which the presence of God was fostered with genius, in which the whole of life was rooted in a vibrant and living knowledge of God at once personal and objective, a life in which (in today's terminology) theology was the dominant occupation of the monk, a theology which blossomed into an intense life of prayer and kept the monk in an habitual companionship with God. This quality of Saint Stephen Harding's mind, which was the root and principle of Cistercian monasticism, has found its best expression, to my knowledge, in a penetrating study of Saint Thomas Aquinas which appeared in La Vie Spirituelle several years ago. The writer, Thomas Deman, O.P., says this of his brother Dominican: "In the case of the majority of saints, sanctity and knowledge seem to be two different things . . . and as a general rule, we do not realize that intellectual excellence may have a connection with the merits which raise a Christian to the altars.

The interest of the case of St. Thomas Aquinas is that we are compelled to investigate the problem .... Among all possible objects, St. Thomas chose to know God. We can bring back to that one point the accumulation of knowledge that he carried in his mind .... Among all objects of knowledge, God is the one possessing singular excellence. For the mind, he is the most wonderful and inexhaustible of objects. He fills man with astonishment and wonder. He forces him to conceive of a beauty and perfection far beyond . . . this world. In the sphere of the intellect, St. Thomas became a kind of companion

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of God. He kept to his solitude habitually to live in such company.... " " To live habitually in the company of God"-nothing de· scribes better the contemplative ideal of Saint Stephen Harding.

Stephen Harding belonged supremely to the Thomistic race of contemplatives and it is noteworthy that scaltered through the writings of Saint Thomas is an exposition and defense of this kind of monastic existence. Saint Thomas, in fact, knows of no other kind of contemplative life and the Cistercian Order was created to foster this profound and personal kind of con· templative life.

What one writer has written about the intellect of John F. Kennedy could be written just as accurately of Stephen Hard· ing: "He was objective, practical, ironic, skeptical, unfettered and insatiable." He was also bold, original, daring, unconven· tiona!, and untiring. His pragmatic sense was rooted in a pro· found theological vision and this wedding of pragmatics and theology, rare in our age but just as rare in his own, was the energizing force of his genius and is stamped on everything he wrote and in the style and design of his contemplative creation.

There is no place that he reveals himself more than in a touching and spiritually frank letter which he wrote to the Abbot of Sherborne shortly before he died. Sherborne had been his home and it was there that he discovered God and was nourished by a rich contemplative life. He left Sherborne to find or to build a dream, and when the dream was ac· complished, he wrote back to those who had guided him in his first steps towards God. The Latin of the letter is lucid and quivers with feeling. These are his words: "Wriling letters makes those who are absent seem present and joins in affection those separated by long distances. In the deepest part of my being, I feel that I have never left you, for you took me in as a child at Sherborne and educated me carefully and tenderly. When I came across the ocean, you had stamped me with the image of yourself, and I carried with me as a God-given treasure all that you had shown and

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taught me, spurring me on to accomplish great things. Whatever I am and have has come from you, and now I ask that you who nourished me in the ways of God will ask God boldly for even greater things. For I have not labored in vain and the harvest of forty long years spreads out before my eyes, as I look forward to death and the reward of working in the Lord's vineyard.

"And so do not let the good things you have heard about us lessen the fervor of your prayers for us. For our labors are not over, and we wish to go forward, chastely and humbly, not lessening our fervor, clinging with all our thought and feeling to God, until he satisfies us with the vision of himself, which is the goal of all our labors."

No commentary could be more eloquent witness to his strong and vibrant spirit than these words written at the end of a long life.

VISION OF AN INNOVATOR

For most of his life, Stephen Harding worked against the grain of the obvious. He was at odds with his times, with his contemporaries, and with popular notions. He created a climate for change and stepped progressively from a minor figure in the drama to a leading force. His strength was in his vision, which knew precisely what it wanted, which could carefully distinguish between the essentials of monastic life and the supplements of men's devising, and could boldly depart from the conventional when the conventional stood in the way. His arsenal of ideas was scattered through some of the most amazing documents in the history of monasticism, ideas which in his own time were highly revolutionary and were drawn from no existing tradition. He appears on the scene, does his unique work, and departs. When he came upon the scene, there was chaos, anarchy, and spiritual stagnation. When he leaves, there is order, unity, and a rich spiritual awakening, setting the world aflame with sanctity. In the generation that followed him were born Becket, St. Hugh of Lincoln, Stephen Langton, and Saint Dominic. All felt the influence of his spiritual genius

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and each in some way resemhles him. It is significant that two of them, Thomas a Becket and Stephen Langton sought refuge and solitude in the monastery founded by Stephen Harding's favorite disciple, Hugh of Macon, at Pontigny. And it would not be historically inaccurate to see more than a verbal resemblance between the Carta Caritati.< of Stephen Harding and the Magna Carta of Stephen Langton.

By nature he grasped the larger view and he maneuvered the Cistercian reform, which in its externals resembled many other reforms taking place at the same time, into its historical position with all the insight and adroitness of a power politi¡ cian. His grasp of human affairs apparently was phenomenal, and this is not surprising considering that his contemporaries were men of the stature of Hildebrande (Gregory VII), Laofranc, Anselm of Canterbury, Bruno of Cologne, the notorious Ranulph of Bessin (Flambard), and the key figure of his age, William the Conqueror. It is also not surprising considering his intellectual and monastic genealogy. Contributing to the spiritual personality of Stephen Harding were the luminous and lovable Cuthbert of Lindisfame, Benedict, Biscop, Bede the Venerable, Dunstan of Canterbury, and Alfred the Great. One generation removed from him saw a figure who resembled him more closely than any of these: St. Wulfstan, the Saxon bishop who survived the Norman Conquests, with his courage, his personality, his boldness, and his wit intact. There is a biting edge to Stephen Harding's personality, but it was softened by his Saxon breeding and by his contemplative vision.

If he accomplished nothing else for mediaeval monasticism, he created options. His option, he felt, was as valid as that presented by Cluny. In doing so, he challenged Cluny's monopoly in monastic matters and brought down upon his followers the intense hatred of the Abbots of Cluny until St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable made peace. Even then it was Stephen Harding's option that made the most sense.

Other options followed upon his and from his boldness came variety. His monastic declaration of independence inspired other revolutions from the Cluniac empire.

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What set him apart in the twelfth century was a tenacity of purpose in seeking his own rendezvous with destiny; he saw no reason why evil and greedy men should have a monopoly on boldness, and noted that worldly minded and ambitious men found little to oppose their schemes and that their schemes usually succeeded. Right before his very eyes he had the example of Flambard, the henchman of William Rufus, whose boldness in pure malevolence rocked the age. Stephen rocked it too, and his boldness matched and surpassed that of Flambard.

THE TOTAL CONTEMPLATIVE

Stephen Harding was the total contemplative. Intensely passionate, he rooted his energies on God and opened his whole being to his splendor. This passion for God shot a wind of fury through his bones and brought him face to face with the breathtaking reality of eternal life. Faith to him was knowledge, knowledge made vibrant by an insatiable curiosity that constantly plumbed the depths of theological knowledge and carved monuments of wonder in his mind. From this came a style of life noticed by all around him, remarked even by men a century removed from him. The truth which he gasped and lived by he embazoned on his age in the Order of Citeaux, and scrawled across the face of his century a message that impressed itself into the very stones of his monasteries.

This unmistakeable mystique, profoundly theological but intensely personal, molded the Cistercian Order into a unique entity. Cistercian life was totally contemplative and this set it apart from the other monastic institutions of the age.

The young prophet who shook the dust of Molesme from his sandles and challenged the monastic empire of Cluny mellowed and matured into the old visionary whose eyes searched the horizons for the promised land and waited for the coming of the Lord in thunder. His eyes always seemed to be shy with secrets and the intensity of his expectations was evident even on his deathbed, when he looked back only once--to wonder if he had shared his vision as mightily as he might. After

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he died, Burgundy burned with his memory and legends were created, larger than life, but not larger than the memory.

The sanctity of Saint Stephen Harding was a rare contemplative sanctity, shot through with a theological directness reflected in Thomas a Becket and Thomas Aquinas, eminently human, sane, adventurous, impassioned, and original. He had pn,pared himself for his role in history, not directly by forseeing his future labors, but by pursuing sharply defined goals and commiting himself to a definite intellectual and contemplative tradition. This commitment he never forsook and this tenacity is characteristic of his sanctity.

At a time when western Christendom was disillusioned and in near despair he appeared, recovered lost hopes, and quickened aspirations into reality. In his lifetime, Godfrey de Bouillion stormed Jerusalem and called half of the youth of Europe to his banner. Stephen stormed the New Jerusalem and his white Cistercian habit became a symbol of a challenge greater than Godfrey's.

On November 21, 1964, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church received formal ap¡ probation. This document uses many hihlical images and references to portray the Church, the most popular and lasting of which are those which picture the Church as the People of God and the People of God on pilgrimage. Preceding all these images is a description of the Church as a mystery.

Walter Abbott remarkes, "The term mystery indicates that the Church as a divine reality inserted into history cannot be Collectice fully captured by human bargaining is thought or language. As Paul inevitable in VI said in his opening allocu¡ ecclesiastical tion at the second session institutions (Sept. 29, 1963): 'The Church is a mystery. It is a reality imbued with the hidden presence of God. It lies therefore ROBERT A. RIECHER within the very nature of the Church to be open to new and + greater exploration' " ( Documents of V caican II, New York, p. 14).

Such rna jectic language however cannot obscure the human reality of the Church. As it passes through history, it translates its noble aims and lofty purposes into stabilized forms and institutions. The Constitution on the Church does not overlook the reality of a Code of Canon Law, much of which recognizes 207

/JarlJaininfJ and Chur~h-re/ateJ

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the historical development of ecclesiastical institutions. The Church assumes various concrete structures which are not essential to the nature of the Church itself, although some structures, some forms, some institutionalization will always be necessary.

STRUCTURES IN THE CHURCH

Historically, dioceses, parishes, schools, hospitals, homes for the aged, newspapers, and financial institutions are established by Church officials. These various organizations and structures are subject to the change of human history. Many dioceses and parishes have been eliminated as populations shift. A hospital instituted to serve needy, immigrant poor is replaced by a tremendously complex and diversified institution. Some religious orders have been dissolved or their original purposes have changed. Many lay societies are dying and others are born almost daily. At a given moment in history these institutions, which are ridiculed as unnecessary by some few, are governed by very human laws and experiences. In a complex, urbanized, industrialized culture, these religious institutions become complex, urbanized, and bureaucratized.

John XXIII in Mater et Magistra states: "Certainly, one of the principal characteristics which seem to be typical of our age is an increase in social relationships, in those mutual ties, that is, which grow daily more numerous and which have led to the introduction of many and varied forms of associations in the lives and activities of citizens and to their acceptance without our legal framework" ( n. 59).

This inevitable trend in modern society is described by the frequently misunderstood word, socialization. The Church too is affected by this development of social relationships, a development with accompanying advantages and disadvantages.

All kinds of agencies and institutions are established to welcome the birth of a child, educate his mind, inoculate his body, assist him in need, establish a place for him to worship, care for him in illness, and finally provide a resting place for his body. To perform these varied tasks, ecclesiastical institutions buy and sell, invest and gain profit, hire and fire, and even

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automate. The ecclesiastical lay labor force has increased enormously in recent years.

The expansion of the ecclesiastical labor force has some important implications. In former times, many men worked and labored for ecclesiastical institutions. Many monasteries owned lands which were farmed by peasants with a divided share of the produce. The guild system, which attempted to regulate early medieval industry, was supported with official Church encouragement. Occasionally, workingmen's guilds, which were religious and economic institutions, determined conditions for promotion as well as religious formation. Now a new type of industrialism has emerged, and a nostalgic recollection of medieval guilds by Leo XIII was accompanied by a desire for their reestablishment in accordance with modern conditions.

Within ecclesiastical institutions, modern conditions have changed their mode of operation. Since they are affected by the very conditions of modern economic society, they are also bound by its canons of social, distributive, and commutative justice. It would be inconsistent for the Church to have a body of social thought (which Pius XI referred to in Quadragesimo Anno as a "social and economic science in accord with the conditions of the time") without implementing this thought within its own operations. There can be no doubt that this thought is important.

John XXIII stresses this aspect of Catholic thought by stating: "The permanent validity of the Catholic Church's social teaching admits of no doubt. This teaching rests on one basic principle: individual human beings are the foundation, the cause and the end of every social institution . . . . On this basic principle, the Church constructs her social teaching. . . .

But today, more than ever, it is essential that his doctrine be known, assimilated and put into effect in the form and manner the different situations allow and demand. . . . We reaffirm most strongly that this Catholic social doctrine is an integral part of the Christian conception of life .... It is not enough merely to formulate a social doctrine. It must be translated into reality" (Mater et M agistra, mi. 218-226).

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The governing bodies of ecclesiastical institutions are bound by the body of thought which we call papal social thought.

They also should serve as examples to the world in their mode of implementing such principles.

THE SOCIAL ENCYCLICALS

Some approach papal social encyclicals as if they were blue· prints. With this view, both the "liberal" and the "conservative" resort to the selection of statements which reflect their own philosophies. The encyclicals are looked upon as source material for maintaining a position. However, social historians may view the encyclicals as culling the best of social thought in a given era of history. Whatever theological positions one holds on the authority of the encyclicals, they are the expres· sion of the popes on social matters. They represent some kind · of judgment on the social issues of the time in which they were published. Their pastoral intent should indicate some guide· lines for the operation of ecclesiastical organizations, societies, and institutions, especially those which employ lay help. Al· though principles are unchanged, the social circumstances in which they are presented do change.

In recent years, there has been interest in the operations of ecclesiastical institutions. Various publications have called for a full disclosure of the economic and financial conditions of ecclesiastical institutions. Others have appealed for a tax on income-producing church-owned properties and economic interests. However, the greatest amount of attention has been given to the relationships between employer and employee, and especially to the matter of collective bargaining. Church·re· lated schools have not remained exempt from the movement toward collective bargaining among teachers in the public school systems. Just as public employees in medical facilities have struggled for improved working conditions, major efforts are now being made to organize hospital workers. Collective bargaining contracts are being pressed for in many areas of church-related employment. Just as the resistance to such bar· gaining agreements varies in various areas of the economy, so

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also has acceptance and rejection in ecclesiastical institutions varied. In Chicago two secondary schools concluded collective bargaining agreements while a third dismissed teachers seeking recognition. Catholic institutions however are expected to be governed by the principles found in the social encyclicals.

It is important then to understand their content.

The social eucyclicals which refer to economic life are generally well known. Each one of them reflects in some way the social conditions of the times in which they were written.

The social encyclicals have been reinforced by a whole series of papal addresses, by letters to particular groups, and also a body of thought developed by those engaged in the intellectual task of applying the social encyclicals to specific problems.

Even though the social conditions surrounding encyclical publi. cation change, a common vision of economic life has been developed. It is customary, for example, to describe the social thought of Leo XIII as basic and simple. Pius XI refers to.

Rerum Novarum (On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) as the "Magna Carta upon which all Christian activity in the social field ought to be based" ( Quadragesimo Anno., n. 39).

Our ordinary manuals describe the social thought of Leo XIII in too simple a manner. He is portrayed as a defender of human rights, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the right to state intervention in an economic system, the right to secure private property. However, a careful reading of Leo's great labor encyclical shows a perception of economic life which also appears in Pius XI and John XXIII. For Leo, as well as for later popes, collective bargaining is not a polarization of employees and employers in mutual antagonism, but a coalition of men sharing common goals. Collective bargaining, as part of economic life, is not merely an arena in which agreements are hammered out, but an area of human development, of human experience in which men develop their per¡ sonalities, express their desire for community, and share in the creation of the conditions of work. Obviously this latter notion has been especially developed by John XXIII, and to

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some limited extent by Paul VI. Leo XIII saw the communittarian nature of the enterprise, but did not develop a full scaled approach to it. He was primarily concerned with specific and immediate conditions of wages, associations, and private property.

THE RIGHT TO COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

In a frequently quoted passage Pius XI wrote: "In the present condition of human society, however, we consider it more advisable that, so far as is possible, the work-contract be somewhat modified by a partnership contract. . . . Workers and other employees thus become sharers in ownership or management or participate in some fashion in the profits received" ( Quadragesimo Anno, n. 10).

As a result, theorists after World War II became enbroiled in the co-determination dispute in Germany. Some insisted upon the natural right of participation, whereas others insisted upon its limitation. In part the dispute was resolved by John XXIII when he wrote: "Like our predecessors, we are convinced of the legitimacy of the wish on the part of the workers to take part in the life of the company which employs them. . . . Man should be allowed to contribute to the organization of the productive activities in which he has a part. . . . The worker should make himself heard; he should be allowed to take part in the running and development of the enterprise" (Mater et M agistra, nn. 32, 84, 91) .

Note especially however this observation by Pope John: "But We have no doubt as to the need for giving workers an active part in the business of the company for which they work, be it a public or a private one. Every effort must be made to ensure that the enterprise is indeed a true human community, concerned about the needs, the activities, and the standing of each of its members" (ibid. n. 91).

In summary, then, men have the right to organize and bargain collectively. To limit the vision of collective bargaining to financial matters underestimates the role of labor associations m the economic system. Through them, as John indicates in

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Christianity and Social Progress, men exercise an influence on both the immediate area of work and on the economic system in general.

Are church-related organizations and institutions to be exempt from this general view of economic life? Obviously, neither the popes nor the Council make any specific reference to an exemption. The person who teaches in a parochial school, who labors on a professional or sub-professional level in a Catholic hospital, who cleans and waxes the place of worship, who prepares material for publication in a Catholic newspaper choose this way of engaging in the economic system. They choose to earn a living by working for church-related agencies and consequently are to be justly treated in these surroundings. Justice embraces much more than suitable wages and working conditions, though these are of prime importance. It requires that those who work have an influence collectively in their place of work.

A BASIC ANATAGONISM There are many arguments offered against collective bargaining in church-related agencies and institutions. Basically, none is able to overcome the major premise that men are free to band together collectively to influence the economic milieu in which they work. Collective relationships expressed in bargaining agreements overcome the weakness of a single person, the paternalistic approaches of some religious officials, and help eliminate a potentially chaotic situation, and above all emphasize the essential communitarian nature of the economic enterprise.

Arguments against this position are frequently evolved to cover over a basic antagonism toward collective bargaining procedures even outside the sphere of religious institutions. The arguments are also specious because they would have religious institutions evade the normal requirements of social and perhaps even commutative justice.

Some argue that federal and state legislation specifically exempts religious institutions of any kind. It is true that the Wagner, Taft-Hartley, and Landrum-Griflin Acts eliminate notfor-profit corporations from protection. This omission simply

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means that a basic moral right is legally unprotected. The right to organize and bargain collectively is a basic moral right; its existence is clear from reflection on man's social nature, and, if one needs such reinforcements, from the state· ments of popes and even of Vatican II (cf. The Church Today, n. 68).

It is also argued that papal social principles apply specifically to profit-making organizations. This position is patently a mis· interpretation of papal social thought. It overlooks and ignores the simple fact that all peple are entitled to band together and form associations for their own protection. There are associa· lions of Catholic hospitals, associations of Catholic secondary schools as well as numerous associations along interest or oc· cupational lines. It is inconsistent for such organizations to exist without recognizing a corresponding right of employees to bargain collectively. The popes as well as Vatican II recognize the rights of public employees, and public bodies for whom public employees work rarely, if ever, make a profit.

Most arguments used against collective bargaining are prag· matic. As such, they ignore the question of moral right and concentrate upon the needs of the organization or institution.

It is stated that hospitals, medical facilities, schools, agencies, and institutions under religious auspices will be forced to suspend operation. Many unionists, having heard this argu· ment since the beginning of unionism, tend to ignore it. Never· theless, collective bargaining will force a reassessment of the operations of religious institutions. Some few perhaps might even be forced to close. Pius XI however in Quadragesimo Anno states: "If however matters come to an extreme crisis, it must finally be considered whether the business can continue or the workers are to be cared for in some other way."

THE FEAR OF STRIKES

Many administrators of educational, medical, and related church organizations oppose union recognition because of a grave fear of strikes. As soon as collective bargaining is men· tioned, strikes are mentioned in the same breath. The right

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to strike is different however from the right to bargain collectively. Collective bargaining has as one of its essential purposes providing alternatives to work stoppages. But even Vatican II does assert that the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike, both within reasonable limits, are rights.

Educational and hospital administrators are most concerned about strikes. Both types of institutions presuppose an orderly and systematic schedule followed regularly. Realistically however, if a single hospital does suspend non-emergency services for a period of time the health of a community is not seriously endangered. If there is a danger to public health, of course, the right to strike must he expressed in another way and its place must be taken by mutually acceptable means of. resolving grievances. Administrators who envision collective bargaining only in terms of stike action have a very narrow and shortâ&#x20AC;˘ip.hted view as to what collective bargaining really is. Labor lP.11ders are just as anxious to avoid strikes as members of the m11nagement team.

Some administrators believe that those men who lead labor organizations are a breed apart, corrupt, powerful, without a sense of justice. Labor leaders are neither more nor less immoral or unjust than any other segment of society. It has always seemed inconsistent that employers in ecclesiastical organizations are willing to hire persons to care for the sick, to form the tender minds of the young, and to take care of church property, but are not willing to trust these same persons when they gather together collectively. Because administrators believe that workers do not really appreciate their problem, they sometimes view collective bargaining as a personal affront to their integrity. Collective bargaining is frequently initiated because of discontent, hut it also may he initiated because of a desire to share and participate.

The cruelest argument against collective bargaining used by some is a cynical one. It simply states that if workers do not like a particular job they can simply leave. To my mind, this attitude reduces workers, teachers,. nurses, etc., to mere cogs in a machine. If the system simply wants Rands and feet,

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arms and bodies, and occasionally minds without the dignity of the person, then the system is inhuman. The view that workers are simply interchangeable parts envisions no such thing as equity in a job, seniority, loyalty, and all the other elements of harmonious labor-management relationships. At a time when so much is written about making the church more human, it is outrageous to maintain a kind of faceless non-compassion in any church-related institution. The argument, though incredible, is still heard and generally misses the whole tenor of papal social thought as it relates to the economic system.

A

QUESTION OF SURVIVAL

Collective bargaining bas many advantages. An awareness of a shaky financial condition, a stabilization of chaotic employment situations, standardization of job requirements are helpful in any enterprise. Admittedly, there are serious questions that must be asked about the future of some ecclesiastical institutions. Will the educational system stratify itself into a middle and upper income educational system? Will governmental aid in any form be forthcoming? Will shared time or other methods of cooperation with local school systems develop?

But from another point of view, it may well be asked if many church-related institutions can survive without some form of collective bargaining. Can a quality educational system be maintained without some of the financial and other improvements now being made in public education? Can proper personnel with required degrees choose a life of teaching in the Catholic educational system without some form of collective bargaining? Medical facilities as well must reexamine their policies. Almost all religious communities in hospital work include a rule of service to the sick poor. Yet without properly assessing the influence of Medicare and Kerr-Mills, private hospitals are economically unable or unwilling to assist the sick poor. Collective bargaining in the hospital field is also inevitable, and it may be a way of stabilizing precarious financial positions.

If administrators accept the moral right of collective bargain-

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ing, are they then bound automatically to recognize any group which assembles itself for this purpose? Since church-related institutions are exempt from most state and federal legislation affecting collective bargaining, there is little precedent in this field. The National Labor Relations has evolved procedures over two dec~des which may assist administrators in forming policy. There should be no objection to any bargaining unit complying with standard NLRB procedures such as card-signing, secret elections, constitutions, etc. The administrators of churchrelated institutions may also look to precedents in the field of white collar employment, in state and federal approaches to collective bargaining for public employees, and contracts and agreements in allied fields of activity. These serve to protect the administration as well as the workers.

Collective bargaining should consider things like no-strike pledges for the duration of the contract, maintenance-of-membership clauses, binding arbitration if desired, and in extreme cases compulsory arbitration. Administrators may also bargain legitimately about job classifications and financial remuneration.

A

UNIQUE PROBLEM

There is a singularly difficult and unique problem which only religious institutions face. What happens in an institution where religious communities and lay people work together?

The formation of a bargaining unit then may become a difficult problem. There are two simple general princi pies which are very obvious. To consider all religious as members of management seems unreasonable. This approach would be a simple denial of what takes place in a hospital, a school, or other church-related institutions. It would also eliminate the possibility of promotion to supervisory positions of those lay persons who are qualified. On the other hand, it also seems unreasonable for a religious superior to use religious authority to command support for a management position which the religious cannot accept. This is a tricky and difficult area, and perhaps problems exist only in the mind of the theorist rather than in reality, but they must be considered. There are six

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possible solutions to this unique problem which are too lengthly to explain here; but as long as lay workers and religious approach this problem in good will, there should be some harmonious arrangement possible.

It should also be stated in all fairness that the first years of collective bargaining are difficult ones. Administrators are faced with new meetings, new demands, new ideas, new sched¡ ules, etc., and they feel put upon. On the other hand, recently recognized collective bargaining units have a backlog of grievances that they want solved immediately, and internal dis¡ cipline is not always easy to maintain. All the suppressed and hidden antagonisms both of a personal and public nature are brought out. But after a time procedures and precedent help make the task easier for both labor and management.

Collective bargaining, leading to such things as job security, health and welfare benefits, participation in some managerial decisions, cooperation, promotion requirements, etc., is in¡ evitable in ecclesiastical institutions. The demand for collective bargaining and association recognition is not necessarily a failure on the part of management but a development in the skills and attitudes of employees. Ecclesiastical institutions should serve as a model of justice, and these ideas are presented to assist administrators in working out a policy of collective bargaining in religious institutions.

The Forum

In-service training for inner-city teachers of religion

ROBERT H. DOUGHERTY

Since May of 1966, two hundred and fifty grade school teachers from Chicago's inner city schools have attended a "Cathechetical Weekend." This number includes seventy princi¡ pals and about twenty-five lay teachers. Six of these weekends have already taken place and four more are planned for the 1967-68 school year. This is part of a broader program sponsored and developed by the Religious Education Committee of the Center for Urban Education (CUE).

CUE is under the direction of Sister Francis Raphael, O.P., of the Archdiocesan School Board and has its headquarters at 1208 S. Newberry St. It was organized to assist teachers of schools located in the inner city. This includes about one hundred schools, one thousand teachers, and forty thousand children. The CUE Center has become the happy meeting place and resource center for many teachers. CUE's committees are set up to meet the needs expressed by the teachers. One such committee is that on Religious Education.

Frustration runs high in the teaching of religion regardless of school location; yet the teacher of an inner city school 219

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does have particular adjustments to make. A large portion of her class may be made up of non-Catholic boys and girls.

Student attendance at Sunday Mass, a frequent but limited criterion of success in the classroom, may be lacking. Cultural backgrounds of teacher and student may handicap dialogue. The teacher may come to her students with a whole set of ideas about religion that seem to be not only unacceptable, but unintelligible to her students. To go into the classroom day after day and experience failure in trying to share the Good News has to be a giant frustration for a dedicated teacher, religious or lay. With the goal of providing some guidelines and vision for these teachers, the Committee on Religious Education began to meet in November of 1965.

Several months of weekly meetings convinced the committee that the multiple problems faced by the religion teacher demanded first and foremost an attitudinal change on the part of the teacher. Success in communication with a student, avoidance of a merely impersonal handing over of a body of truths and precepts, would require before all else "an acceptance of the student as he is." Perhaps this notion appears so self-evident as to be trite, but consider the plight of the teacher who has been accustomed to think that her job is not done until she has spoken the traditional body of truths and conveyed the importance of living according to the ten commandments. For this teacher to "accept the student as he is" she must be willing to focus first upon the student, not on truths and precepts; she must be willing to value and respect him as a person before he is capable of listening to truths and before he is able to respond to the moral demands of a Christian life. She must adopt the patient outlook of a missionary. Her acceptance of the student must mirror God's acceptance of the student. Only then can she help to create the climate in which the power to respond can grow. More and more educators have identified this attitudinal change as the problem challenging our inner city schools. What follows IS one attempt towards a solution.

Certainly a study day would not suffice, even though it

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would afford the opportunity of contacting large numbers of teachers. It was decided to plan for a weekend when a smaller number of participants could be reached in greater depth.

The commodious setting for the weekends has been Regis Hall, a Jesuit Retreat House in Wadsworth, Illinois, just an hour's drive from the city. Although the living expenses for the week· end have imposed a burden on many of the participating schools, the ready response to invitations has indicated strong support for the program.

The weekend is structured around seven talks, a movie, and discussions. The celebration of the Eucharist is central. Speakers -priest, religious, and lay-plus discussion leaders, make up the team presenting the weekend. The schedule is well filled, but not to the point of excluding time for relaxation and casual conversations.

The talks are designed to act as building blocks, each pre· paring for the next, each reinforcing what has preceded. They are cast in such a way as to open, not close, discussion. This means they are open·ended, and not "answer" talks. The main answer presented by the weekend can only be gained by ex· periencing the whole weekend.

A resume of the thought content would indicate the following ideas. Psychologically we knew a person must be accepted as he is by some other significant person if he is to be able to grow.

This primary acceptance as a necessary step to growth has characterized God's dealing with his people in the Old Testa· ment; the Gospels reveal the same pattern in the saving work of Christ. As Christ reveals the love of God for us he seeks a response of faith from us. This is primarily a belief in the Person of Christ, accepting the fact that we are accepted by him, accepting our relationship to him. Christ respects this response only if it is freely given. If we accept Christ, we also accept his law, which is the law of love. Through this law he unites our love of him with our love of others. He gives the power to break down divisions and barriers. He forms a com· munity of Christians, working out their differences in love.

By the time the talks turn to the topic of community it is

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hoped that the participants will have experienced a growing sense of community throughout the weekend and that this will lend itself to a deeper understanding of this aspect of the Christian message. The celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday will then be not just the source of their unity but a real expression of it. The talks and discussions should shed enough light on the home working situation to show that all their students and the students' families are also caught up in this saving glance of Christ and one with them in Christ. Out of this vision with the help of the Holy Spirit can come a new or renewed attitude to bring back to the neighborhood.

Judging from the statements of the participants the program has had deep and lasting effects. To the question of whether the effects have been felt in the classroom we can ouly speculate.

Looking at the students through a new set of glasses is bound to produce many practical changes in a teacher.

There has been a great willingness on the part of weekend graduates to enter into phase two of the Religious Education Program. This consists of ten two-and-a-half-hour sessions in the Fall and ten more after the Christmas Holidays. During these sessions particulars of the weekend are treated in greater detail. Phase three offers the possibility of discussing pertinent reading matter and a continued sharing of insights.

Needless to say, all phases of the program are subject to on-going planning and revision. The needs of our teachers in the inner city are complex and wide ranging. But at a time when so much remains to be done CUE has a concrete and working beginning through the efforts of many who care. Perhaps these beginnings will be helpful to others facing the same problems.

AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE John F. Dedek is a professor of moral theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois and associate editor of Chicago Studies.

Christopher Kiesling, O.P. teaches liturgical theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology, Dubuque, Iowa and has written for Cross and Crown, Worship, The Thomist, and Chicago Studies.

Richard J. Wojcik is the professor of music at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary and a member of the Sacred Music Com¡ mission of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Gerald F. Kreyche is the chairman of the department of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

George K. Malone, assistant at Holy Trinity Church, Chicago, Illinois, is also a professor of theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary.

Gera1¡d P. Weber, assistant at St. Carthage Church, Chicago, Illinois, is the vice president of ACTA, co-author of Life in Christ, Beyond the commandments, and the Word and Worship Program.

Clifford Stevens is the author of a biography of Stephen Harding, Flame out of Dorset, (Doubleday, 1964).

Robert A. Reicher is a professor of sociology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary Junior College, Niles, Illinois and chaplain to the Catholic Council on Working Life, Chicago, Illinois.

Robert H. Dougherty is the Dean of men at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary and a member of the Liturgical Commission of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

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