Category: Catholic Church

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Bishop Barron Brings It

“A Catholic university is one in which Christ holds the central integrating and organizing place among the circle of disciplines and activities at the university.”

This was the thesis of Bishop Robert Barron in one of the best statements I have encountered about the purpose of the Catholic University, delivered to a packed ballroom here at the University of Notre Dame on March 2, 2023. Here is his address.

Bishop Barron easily vies for the lead evangelist in the Catholic Church in the United States. His model and hero is Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who wrote books, gave talks, and hosted a popular television show for decades in the mid-twentieth century. I have followed Barron’s work for years from his monograph, The Priority of Christ, to his video series, Catholicism, to his hundreds of homilies, podcasts, and videos engaging passages in the Bible and cultural phenomena from baseball to Bob Dylan to Jordan Peterson.

“Because Christ is the incarnate logos, the Word and mind of God,” all of the disciplines “must find their center in Him,” argued Bishop Barron at Notre Dame, continuing on to say that “a great Catholic university is one where the relationship between Christ the Logos and all the other disciplines and activities is explored and celebrated.”

He illustrated his thesis through six disciplines, showing how their knowledge can be connected to Christ. He does not intrude upon the “autonomy” of any of these fields, respecting their canons of knowledge, much of which will be “common knowledge,” accessible to any rational person. He also shows, though, how the truths of each discipline are ordered to Christ. He would not tell a physicist how to do physics, for instance, but he would call for faculty and students who study physics to reflect on how the beauty, order, and, indeed, very existence, of the physical universe points to God.

Bishop Barron’s thesis, it seems to me, implies that at a Catholic university, every department and school would pursue a strategy for ensuring that faculty and students — indeed every student — study how their discipline reflects the truth of the Trinity as known through revelation and reason.

Many colleagues at Notre Dame take on this task in their scholarship and teaching. As a professor of political science, I developed an undergraduate lecture course, Catholicism and Politics, that introduces students to the Church’s thinking about politics and that I have taught now eleven times. I teach a graduate seminar, Christian Political Thought.

In 2017, I and then a colleague in theology, Peter Casarella, launched a course, Why The Church?, inspired by a blog post written in 2016 by Bishop Barron. Lamenting a Pew Research Center report showing young people leaving the Church, Barron rued that the Church has answers to all of the reasons they cited for heading for the exits. He issued a cri de coeur for apologists, evangelists, and theologians to “wake up!”

The course (syllabus here) adopts a “disputatio” approach that looks at the major reasons that young people leave the Church and how the Church responds. The topics are: the rationality of God, science and God, sexuality and marriage, the Church’s history, the Church’s politics, beauty and the saints, and the case for and against the Resurrection of Christ. The course is now in its fifth teaching. We have Bishop Barron and his vision of a Catholic university to thank.

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The Catholic Church in Nicaragua is Under Caesar’s Sword

The Catholic Church is being repressed at the hands of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. His government placed under house arrest the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando José Álvarez, on August 3, shut down Church radio stations on August 1, and has banned religious protests and processions. In March, it forced into exile the papal nuncio to Nicaragua.

Ortega represses the Catholic Church to secure the rule of himself and his party. He has been president since 2007 and won a fourth consecutive term in 2021, an election in which he faced no political opposition and had indeed arrested his opponents. The Catholic Church is the remaining civil society organization that retains, or struggles to retain, freedom from the state, as this piece in the New York Times explains well:

But as Mr. Ortega, 76, last year began to purge the few remaining dissidents in politics, civil society, news media, academia, business and culture, the Catholic churches in this deeply religious Central American nation assumed an increasingly pivotal role. More than sources of spiritual solace, they became the only places in the country where citizens could speak their minds and listen to speakers who were not appointed by the state.

Mr. Ortega’s already authoritarian rule tipped into systematic repression last year when it became clear that he lacked a popular mandate to win another term in the general elections held in November. To retain power, he turned the country into a one-party state, jailing all opposition presidential candidates and then moving to silence all other dissident voices. Now, with the last influential clergyman silenced, Nicaragua has reached a milestone, according to human rights activists, former officials and priests: cementing its position as a totalitarian state.

In the book God’s Century (2011), coauthored by Monica Duffy Toft, Timothy Samuel Shah, and myself, we advanced the thesis of late political scientist Samuel Huntington that the Catholic Church was a motor of the wave of global democratization that began in 1974. The Church opposed dictatorships most powerfully in countries such as Poland and the Philippines in the 1980s, where it had preserved independence from state in authority in its governance, finances, personnel, and other aspects of authority, and was co-opted by authoritarian and violent states such as Rwanda and Argentina, where it was weaker and far less independent. Doubtless Ortega perceives this. He must control the Church, he reasons, if he is to remain in power unopposed.

Exemplary among global responses has been that of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, Italy. Here is his view as reported in an article in the National Catholic Register.

Cardinal Zuppi underlined that “with dismay and incredulity we receive news of the harsh persecutions that the people of God and their pastors are undergoing because of fidelity to the Gospel of justice and peace.”

“In recent weeks we have followed with concern the decisions taken by the government against the Christian community, also implemented through the use of force by the military and police forces. Lately we have learned of the arrest of H.E. Msgr. Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, Bishop of Matagalpa, together with other people, including priests, seminarians and laity,” the cardinal said.

It is a “very serious act, which does not leave us insensitive and which induces us to keep our attention high on what happens to these brothers of ours in the faith,” and which took place in circumstances and contexts that “arouse particular apprehension not only because they take it aims at Christians who are prevented from the legitimate exercise of their beliefs, but because they are part of a moment in which the most elementary human rights appear to be strongly threatened.”

Italy’s bishops, therefore, join “the requests of the international community, which have also found a voice in the recent declarations of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres. We therefore ask the political leaders to guarantee freedom of worship. and of opinion not only to the exponents of the Catholic Church, but to all citizens.”

Nicaragua reminds us that the persecution of Christians, and religious freedom in general, continues to be violated around the world. The Under Caesar’s Sword project serves as a forum for educating the world about the persecution of Christians.

This coming Monday, August 29th, begins a six-week online course, “Under Caesar’s Sword: Christians in Response to Persecution,” taught by The Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. It is not too late to sign up!

This past summer, Notre Dame student Joseph London updated the Country Profiles of Under Caesar’s Sword, which describe persecution in 25 countries and serve as a resource for education. The profiles were first developed around 2015-2017 and so have needed to be updated. The countries alas do not include Nicaragua, whose persecution was not acute in 2014, when Under Caesar’s Sword’s research scholars were recruited to study designated countries first hand.

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New Nigerian Bishop is Peacemaker

This piece is a guest post by Nnadozie Onyekuru, who is currently a Master of Global Affairs student at the University of Notre Dame.

Catholic media outlets were abuzz this spring with the news of Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s transfer to Washington D.C. but an analogous appointment in Africa’s most populous country went largely unnoticed. In March this year, the Vatican announced Pope Francis’ appointment of Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama as the co-adjutor archbishop of Abuja. This means that Kaigama will eventually succeed John Cardinal Onaiyekan as the archbishop of Abuja.

The appointment is significant in matters of religion and public affairs in Nigeria. As the Roman Catholic prelate of the nation’s capital, the archbishop of Abuja exercises a unique voice in discourses surrounding national policies and events. A corollary to this influence is the expectation that it is used to promote national unity and progress.

Archbishop Kaigama’s antecedents will assist him to easily assume this civic expectation. He is currently the head of the Catholic Church in Jos, one of the crossroads of Nigeria’s ethno-religious harmony and his pastoral experience there led him into the difficult work of peacebuilding and reconciliation. In this respect, he will continue the work of Cardinal Onaiyekan. Again, like Onaiyekan, he is a past president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, CBCN. During his leadership of the CBCN, two major opposition presidential candidates in Nigeria sought the conference’s audience while clarifying their views on religion, national unity, and development.

After the opposition’s historic victory, Kaigama and the CBCN struggled between giving the newly elected government the benefit of the doubt and criticizing it for its shortcomings on matters concerning the sanctity of Nigerian lives. It’s a familiar aspect of episcopal responsibility in Africa and the more a Catholic bishop is in the spotlight, the greater the dilemma. That dilemma will now be even more fixed in Archbishop Kaigama’s mind as he prepares to heed Pope Francis’ call.

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Evangelical Episcopal Repentance

Recent allegations about years of sexual abuse on the part of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick have elevated years of scandal in the Catholic Church to new heights and dissipated hopes that the Church’s can put these troubles in the past. Not only are the acts that have been revealed heinous but also they were (allegedly but with strong evidence) committed by a priest en route to one of the most prominent prelatures in the United States, accompanied by honors, accolades, garlands, ecclesial influence . . . and (some of) his fellow bishops’ (highly probable) knowledge of his treachery.

Heretofore the scandals have been mostly about the abuses of rank-and-file priests and the failure of bishops to address them. Now, it is bishops’ knowledge of other bishops’ misdeeds and crimes that is at stake. The U.S. Church’s credibility is at a new low and the prospect of continued departures from the pews at a new high.

I count myself among those who hold that nothing less than an independent investigation led by laity can uncover who knew what and failed to act and begin to restore the Church’s credibility.

Over the past two decades that these events have taken place, though, I have often asked myself why the Church’s dominant language and response to the scandals has been an essentially secular one — that of law courts, bureaucratic procedure, and corporate deflection. Admittedly, enormous law suits force such behavior. There is no question, too, that safeguards of a bureaucratic nature are indispensable for protecting would be victims.

Still, I have often sensed that the Gospel has been left to the sidelines. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then why doesn’t it be what it is and face its sin and woundedness according to the logic of its founding, which was, after all, a decisive and thorough defeat of sin, an episode of cosmic restoration and healing, an act of solidarity with victims, an invitation to repentance, and an act of forgiveness?

The meaning of this comprehensive act of reconciliation for the crisis at hand would take some thinking through. I was heartened, though, to see a piece today along these lines written by Dawn Eden Goldstein, a widely read Catholic blogger who has written extensively on facing past wounds, including those arising from sexual abuse, through mercy and healing. She writes:

Given that the bishops form a college in continuation of the Apostles’ own, they need to take the initiative in summoning themselves, as a body, to public acts of penance for (1) the sins of bishops and all clerics, and (2) those who enabled or failed to act against such wrongdoers.

She elaborates:

The US bishops have the responsibility to show all the members of the Body of Christ what true contrition and reparation looks like. If the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced it was summoning every one of its members to a public act of personal and collegial reparation, the bishops would thereby show they understand that (1) the sins of shepherds have a particularly destructive impact upon the entire Church and (2) if even one bishop is guilty, the entire college owes reparation to God, that He may heal the wound their brother inflicted upon His holy people.

The idea had been floated but not followed through, she explains, quoting ArcU blogger Michael Griffin:

Collegial penance is not a novel idea. In April 2002, as the abuse crisis was unfolding, Pope John Paul II called all US cardinals to Rome for a private meeting. Afterwards, the Vatican issued a communiqué proposing, among other things, that “it would be fitting for the Bishops of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to ask the faithful to join them in observing a national day of prayer and penance, in reparation for the offences perpetrated and in prayer to God for the conversion of sinners and the reconciliation of victims.”

Theologian Michael Griffin describes in his 2016 book The Politics of Penance the disappointing response of the bishops to the Pope’s recommendation. The USCCB agreed only to instruct bishops to fast and do private penance on August 14 2002. Although they included the option for local dioceses to offer public acts of penance on that day, just a small handful of bishops followed through.

In September 2016, Pope Francis called upon every episcopal conference worldwide to designate a Day of Prayer for abuse victims. This time, the USCCB did at least respond with a public act – a Mass at the beginning of its 2017 spring meeting in Indianapolis with two hundred bishops in attendance. Once again, however, the bishops did not bind themselves to performing public penitential observances in their own dioceses; such acts were recommended but remained only optional.

She goes on to describe how repentance so far has fallen short and how it can be improved — well worth reading.

Following Goldstein’s lead, we might do more to think through what other dimensions of evangelical reconciliation have to offer. Whereas repentance has been discussed but scantly followed through, another practice that Jesus taught clearly — forgiveness — has been seldom mentioned at all. What might it mean? It’s the subject of a future post.

 

 

 

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The Christian Response to Persecution of Archbishop Bashar Warda

In the aftermath of the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, what is the future of the Christian church there? Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the population of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from 1.6 million to just under 400,000 in 2016 (estimates vary). Will they continue to exit? Return? Rebuild as a smaller church?

One of the leaders in answering these questions and shepherding the church in Iraq is Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Church, based in Irbil, Iraq. Warda has been an international voice for the church, has provided pastoral care and facilitated relief services for 20,000 people, supported refugees, promoted inter-religious dialogue, and inaugurated a Catholic university in 2015.

Earlier this semester, the Under Caesar’s Sword project here at Notre Dame hosted Archbishop Warda with the support and sponsorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture. Warda spoke in several venues in the United States, including Georgetown University, where he was hosted by the Religious Freedom Research Project, partner in Under Caesar’s Sword. Warda exemplifies what Under Caesar’s Sword is all about: the response of Christians to persecution. He exemplifies one of the most salient findings of the project, namely that Christians respond to persecution even under the most difficult of circumstances through constructive efforts to build ties with other communities and contribute to the common good, thereby strengthening their freedom and position in society. Outsiders who understand this response can better assist Christians living under persecution.

Warda’s talk at Notre Dame was well attended and well received. Several students afterwards asked how they could be involved in helping persecuted Christians. One student, Zach Pearson, wrote up the talk in Notre Dame’s renowned student publication, The Irish Rover. As Pearson describes, Warda’s first point was a challenge to Muslims:

He stated that “if there is to be any future for Christians and other religious minorities … in the Middle East, there must be a change and correction within Islam.”

He was predominantly concerned with the ideology of political Islam, including the enshrining of sharia as state law, which causes non-Muslims to effectively become second class citizens.  He called it a “ruling system that preaches inequality and justified persecution,” which therefore needs to be stopped in order for Christians to survive.  This realization has been made by leading Muslim minds in Asia, but has not yet found its way to the Middle East, the archbishop noted.

In reference to ISIS, the archbishop said that “while the fighting force of Daesh [ISIS] may have been defeated … the idea of the reestablishment of the caliphate has been firmly implanted in many minds throughout the Muslim world.”  He made the point that it is a change in ideology along with a prevention of violence that is key to saving the Christian presence in the Middle East.

His second point was about how the West could help Christians survive in Iraq:

He highlighted a few main points:  the importance of prayer; efforts from Western leaders to support equality for minorities in countries where persecution is taking place; and material and intellectual support focused on helping create sustainable Christian communities, specifically in the realms of education and healthcare. Additionally, the archbishop cited the importance of not allowing a sense of “historical relativism” to cloud the reality of persecution.

When asked what college students can do to actively contribute to helping persecuted Christians, he said that “praying for us is important.”  He spoke to the importance of social media to raise awareness for persecuted Christians, who, he reminded the audience, are “the most persecuted religion today.”  He referred to students who have come to help teach in schools and volunteer in these communities for anywhere from a one month to a whole year.  Finally, he called students to speak out publicly on campus, asking rhetorically, “when the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campus here hold demonstrations and carry signs that [say] ‘We are all Christians’?”

To me, one of the most remarkable of Warda’s points was a response to persecution that he recounted Christians in Iraq exercising: forgiveness. Christians have forgiven and continue to forgive their persecutors. This does not preclude at all their efforts to secure help, bolster their position, or defeat ISIS decisively. It is one response of Christians, though, that amounts to a distinctly Christian response.

 

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A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? A New Book

A new book edited by Ryan Anderson and myself is now available.  It’s A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? and is a collection of essays from the journal, The Review of Politics, founded here at Notre Dame in 1939.   Together, the articles tell the story of the conversation between liberalism and Catholicism — sometimes one of rapprochement, sometimes one of tension — in 20th and 21st century America. In the journal’s early years, it featured articles by European emigrés like Jacques Maritain, who admired the American experiment in liberal democracy and sought to ground a defense of it in Catholic principles.  Do not miss the 1950 piece by Heinrich Rommen, which is one of the strongest Catholic defenses of religious liberty prior to the Church’s declaration, Dignitatis Humanae, in 1965.  Later essays in the 1990s and 2000s by David Schindler, Michael Baxter, and William Cavanaugh raise skeptical arguments against American liberalism.

The volume features an essay by philosopher John Finnis that Anderson and I commissioned for this occasion in which Finnis responds to Ernest Fortin’s 1982 critique of Finnis’ 1980 classic, Natural Law and Natural Rights.

Anderson and I have an introductory essay that explores the conversation between Catholicism and American liberalism through the pieces.

These are only a few samples from this new collection.

Here is the book description from University of Notre Dame Press:

This volume is the third in the “Perspectives from The Review of Politics” series, following The Crisis of Modern Times, edited by A. James McAdams (2007), and War, Peace, and International Political Realism, edited by Keir Lieber (2009). In A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, editors Daniel Philpott and Ryan Anderson c1hronicle the relationship between the Catholic Church and American liberalism as told through twenty-seven essays selected from the history of the Review of Politics, dating back to the journal’s founding in 1939. The primary subject addressed in these essays is the development of a Catholic political liberalism in response to the democratic environment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Works by Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Yves R. Simon forge the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and American liberal institutions, including the civic right of religious freedom. The conversation continues through recent decades, when a number of Catholic philosophers called into question the partnership between Christianity and American liberalism and were debated by others who rejoined with a strenuous defense of the partnership. The book also covers a wide range of other topics, including democracy, free market economics, the common good, human rights, international politics, and the thought of John Henry Newman, John Courtney Murray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as some of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of the last century, among them John Finnis, Michael Novak, and William T. Cavanaugh. This book will be of special interest to students and scholars of political science, journalists and policymakers, church leaders, and everyday Catholics trying to make sense of Christianity in modern society.

“The pages of the Review of Politics since its founding in 1939 can be read as a chronicle of this partnership between the Catholic Church and liberal institutions—its development, its heyday, its encounter of travails, its ongoing virtues, and its persistent flaws. Indeed, the partnership has been fraught with controversy over its true extent, its robustness, and its desirability.” — from the introduction, A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?