By: Cari Donaldson

Sometimes, as an English major, there are certain books I feel guilty for not having read.  Moby Dick.  Anything by Joyce, even a couple pages’ worth.  As aCatholic  English major, adding Flannery O’Connor to the list seemed almost a stoning offense.

Oh, I tried.  I tried to read her and like her, and, failing that, I tried to read her and understand her.  I couldn’t.  If there was a point beyond “bad things happen in dreadful ways”, I missed it.

Then I came across a  really great essay  on O’Connor written by Daniel at  Carrots for Michaelmas.  It’s more than worth a read in its entirety, but it was this quote that really stuck with me:

“But, more dangerously for the Christian,  we’re safe from a violent encounter with Christ. What I mean by that is that we’ve all heard the bloody, scandalous, disturbing elements of Christianity for so long they’ve lost the ability to shock or surprise. It’s easy to forget how radical the call of Christ truly is.  “

The quote made such an impression on me because it not only made me want to give O’Connor another try, but also because I had just read Pope Francis’ interview and was wading through the wreckage of people’s responses to it.

I know that places like NARAL and HuffPo and, shoot, the mainstream media as a whole completely missed the point, and instead decided to “helpfully” translate the three-day interview for their readers to “Shorter Pope: Let your freaky sex flag fly, he won’t judge!”, and I am in no position, from my small and messy corner of the Internet, to dissuade them of their misconception.

But for all the faithful who are wringing their hands and wailing and gnashing teeth about the Pope’s comments, I say this: go back and read that quote right up there.  Christianity is not a safe, comfortable religion.  It’s not a set of manners.  It’s not a political path.  It is a shockingly radical concept- that God Himself loves us so much- us! stupid bags of bones and snot and bad attitudes!- that He became one of us so that we may know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, so that we may be happy with Him in the next.

I’ve heard people complain that the Pope’s words have made things even more difficult for conservative politicians here in America. I’ve heard people complain that the interview signed the death warrant on marriage here in the Western world.

To everyone upset by the Pope’s interview because you think it undermines the Church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, and the permanence of marriage, you’ve been given a great chance to be re-scandalized by Christianity.  You’ve been shocked and surprised by the Gospel once again, and that’s an amazing gift!  This is your opportunity to remember that the Universal Church is bigger than America, or the West, or politics.

Look at the progression of our catechism- we must know God first, then choose to love Him, and  from  that love will flow a desire to serve Him.  There are so many people in this broken and toxic culture that don’t even  know  God.  There are so many people enslaved to sin that yearn to love God.  If we, as disciples of Christ, can help with those first two things, then the last one- serving God, will follow organically.  Engaging the culture about sex and abortion without first giving them some reason to know and love God is like yelling at someone for cutting their arm off and bleeding out when we should be doing everything we can to get them to a doctor.

This is not to say that the moral teachings of the Church aren’t important.  They are.  But they are important only because they help us get closer to God.  They have no value apart from their relationship to Him.

In a world as damaged and fallen as ours is, it is tempting to impose order first, simply to stop the noise from all this sin, then introduce God into the quiet, but that’s not the way our hearts and souls were designed.  We need to remember always that Christianity is about following Christ first, and everything else is a result of that relationship.  There is a whole world longing to be seen and loved and healed by Christ, so we need to be sure we’re bringing them Jesus, and not simply a political cause.  We need to remember the radical call of Christ, and resist the urge to swap it out for something temporal and fleeting,  something safe and tame, something that will never heal us the way God can.

Credit to  Cari Donaldson of CatholicExchange.

 

By: Michael Cook

Two stem cell researchers have shared the Nobel Prize  in Medicine for 2012, an elderly Briton, Sir John B. Gurdon, and a younger Japanese, Shinya Yamanaka. By a serendipitous coincidence, Sir John made his discovery in 1962 – the year of Yamanaka’s birth.

Fifty years of stem cell research have brought cures for intractable diseases within reach but they have also generated firestorms of controversy. Between 2001 and 2008, stem cell research vied with climate change as the most contentious issue in science. But since then, the firestorm died down – basically because of Yamanaka’s achievements. In fact, Tom Douglas, of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at Oxford University, describes Yamanaka’s work as “a rare example of a scientific discovery that may solve more ethical problems than it creates”.

So what happened in these 50 years? (Click here for a graphic explanation  from the Nobel Committee.)

In his classic experiment at the University of Cambridge, Sir John discovered that cell development is reversible. The conventional wisdom was that cells could never change once they had specialized as nerve, skin, or muscle cells. He proved that this was wrong by replacing the nucleus of a frog egg cell with a nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. This modified cell developed into a normal tadpole.

This astonishing development eventually led to the cloning of the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996 and subsequent attempts by rogue scientists to clone human beings.

But while the technique clearly worked, no one really understood how cell development worked. The obvious target for research was the embryo. From this ball of undifferentiated cells come each of the body’s specialized cells – more than 200 of them in humans. Surely the answer must lie there. In 1998 an American scientist, James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isolated and cultivated human embryonic stem cells.

But a one-eyed focus on embryos left stem cell science hostage to ethics. Despite scientists’ bravado, everyone had some qualms about destroying embryos for their stem cells. Even Thomson  admitted to the New York Times  that “if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough”.

Still, it seemed the only way forward. Desperate patient advocates, backed by a supporting chorus of bioethicists, scientists and doctors, argued tearfully that the possibility of miracle cures had to trump ethics.

But, in 2006, there came astonishing news from the University of Kyoto. An orthopaedic surgeon turned stem cell scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, had discovered that skin cells from mature mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. It was an amazingly imaginative step. Instead of mimicking natural development from embryo to adult, why not wind back the clock from adult to embryo?

Yamanaka found that by introducing only a few genes, specialized skin cells could become pluripotent stem cells, i.e. immature cells that can develop into all types of cells in the body. Until then, creating pluripotent cells without resorting to cloning seemed unlikely. Like Gurdon, for whom he has an immense respect, Yamanaka had skittled the conventional wisdom.

This was electrifying news for biologists. It was as if commuters on the pot-holed, terrorist-infested road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone could suddenly detour down a six-lane autobahn at 200km. Many famous scientists dropped human embryonic stem cells and began work on what Yamanaka had termed “induced pluripotent stem cells”. A year later, in November 2007, both he and James Thomson, in separate papers, confirmed that human cells could also be reprogrammed.

The rest is history.

As the  Nobel Committee says  about Gurdon and Yamanaka’s research, “Textbooks have been rewritten and new research fields have been established. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy.”

What turned Yamanaka away from the group-think which goaded his colleagues into the swamp of human embryonic stem cell research? Nowadays, the feverish excitement over human embryonic stem cells in the early Noughties seems ridiculous. Leading scientific and medical journals launched a crusade of Enlightenment heroes against prejudiced troglodytes. In one memorable endorsement of embryo research, the  New England Journal of Medicine   – the world’s leading medical journal —  published an editorial  which concluded with this cringeworthy hyperbole: “The Promethean prospect of eternal regeneration awaits us, while time’s vulture looks on.” It never mentioned cell reprogramming.

Yamanaka’s originality may have sprung from his ethical sensitivities. Even Julian Savulescu, the director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who has no objections to embryo research, recognises this. “Yamanaka has taken people’s ethical concerns seriously about embryo research and modified the trajectory of research into a path that is acceptable for all. He deserves not only a Nobel Prize for Medicine, but a Nobel Prize for Ethics.”

In an interview with the  New York Times  in 2007, Yamanaka remembered one day years before when he paid a social visit to a friend’s IVF clinic. There, he peered through a microscope. “When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realised there was such a small difference between it and my daughters,” said the father of two. “I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.”

Nor does he believe that scientists should put progress above ethics. In another 2007 interview, with  New Scientist, he spoke about the firestorms. “These are very difficult decisions, and I think that society should make them,” he said. “It should not be scientists. They can find it difficult to think like the person on the street, and instead may see it simply as a good opportunity. We scientists can be involved in the decision-making process, but I think unless society is comfortable with the therapy it should not go ahead.”

Once again, experience shows that that ethical science is good science.

Credit to  Michael Cook of CatholicExchange.

 

By: Benjamin Mann

The 19^th  century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard  was preoccupied with the problem of “becoming a Christian in Christendom”: that is, the problem of following Jesus in a society where Christianity was simply the done thing, expected (at least nominally) of any respectable person. Where, in such a world, was the risk and sacrifice of living alongside the Crucified Messiah? How could authentic faith exist in a society determined to render it safe and domesticated?

In the 20^th  century, G.K. Chesterton diagnosed a new, but related problem: that of being a Christian in a post-Christian culture, convinced it has progressed beyond Jesus and the Church. The world, in Chesterton’s words, thinks the faith has “been tried and found wanting,” when it has only “been found difficult and left untried.”

This dilemma develops logically from Kierkegaard’s problem: where the Gospel was once identified with the status quo and taken for granted, it is now identified with the past and dismissed. In response, Chesterton was at pains to show that Christian orthodoxy is not a historical relic, but an “eternal revolution” — a source of constant renewal and endless life. Our faith proposes the convergence of time and eternity; a Christian looks to what is past because it may provide an image of what is timeless.

We now live, to a degree, with both problems: the Kierkegaardian problem of a stagnant Christendom, and the Chestertonian dilemma of an “eternal revolution” appearing outdated in the eyes of the world.

Kierkegaard’s diagnosis still applies, and will apply insofar as Western culture remains residually Christian. As long as faith in Jesus appears conventional and safe, we will have the Kierkegaardian quandary of “becoming a Christian in Christendom.”

But Chesterton’s warning accords increasingly with the new cultural reality in which the Gospel is seen as obsolete. This problem emerges in a world whose central myth is that of evolutionary progress: nothing is fixed for all time; the new is always more advanced than the old, and Christianity is supposedly “old.”

Combined, the two realities pose a unique challenge. It is the challenge of a world where belief in Jesus no longer seems revolutionary, but can be regarded — approvingly or dismissively — as the symbol of a past status quo. Some want that past back; others want it gone; but all seem to agree in seeing it as “past.”

This is a surprising commonality between today’s cultural “conservatives” and “progressives.” Though they draw different conclusions from the fact, both groups tend to see Christianity as “That Old Time Religion”: not a faith pointing toward eternity, but a symbol — for good or ill — of history.

Some cultural combatants want to restore the bourgeoisie form of “Christendom” that Kierkegaard attacked. They prefer the world that conflated faith with social convention, a “churchgoing world” of cultural cohesion.  “It wasn’t perfect,”  they may acknowledge,“but it was better than the mess we have today!”

For others, however, Christian orthodoxy appears not so much false as outmoded.“Jesus was a great teacher, and we can still learn from him,”  they may say,  “but the world has moved on. Spirituality evolves, as humanity does; we know now that no set of beliefs can be definitive for all times and places.”

*

Both of these attitudes toward Christianity — nostalgic conservatism and dismissive progressivism — are shallow. Neither reflects an understanding of what the Messiah came to accomplish:  “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!”  (Lk. 12:49)

Yet these misapprehensions correspond to the main cultural currents of our time: a move away from faith, in the name of “progress”; and an opposite insistence on holding to religion as part of a fight to preserve the past. These trends, both based on a misunderstanding of Christian orthodoxy, line up fairly well with our cultural-political Left and Right.

As a believer in Christ, naturally, I have more sympathy with one of those currents than the other: in a pinch, given only two choices — to see our faith lukewarmly respected in the name of “tradition,” or to see it washed away under the banner of “progress” — I will choose the first without much hesitation.

What disturbs me is that these should apparently be the only two choices. What is frustratingly lacking, at least on any substantial cultural scale, is a sense of how traditional Christian orthodoxy could be a force for something other than the conservation of a status quo or the restoration of some past reality.

Kierkegaard and Chesterton were quite different thinkers: an idiosyncratic Protestant and an outspoken Catholic, a solitary and a  bon vivant.  But both of them, in different ways, grasped this central problem: the dilemma of Christianity being viewed as “Old Time Religion” rather than the Divine Revolution.

On the one hand, the world does not seem to want the revolution Christ has brought. The world wants change and progress on its own terms: quantitative and visible, linear and comprehensible, popular and utilitarian. Thus, it will discredit the Kingdom of God by any means necessary — including the modern tactic of casting Jesus and the Church as antiquated. Chesterton’s insight, in this regard, is quite correct.

Yet on the other hand, one may wonder whether many Christians actually want the “eternal revolution” that Jesus brings: the revolution that reveals the Kingdom of God and accomplishes the spiritual remaking of man, not only at the end of time but here and now.

Was Kierkegaard not correct to diagnose a cancer of mediocrity among us? Can we read the Acts of the Apostles and not feel pricked in our consciences? Could our religion even become, in the worst case, a way of keeping God at arm’s length, to remain at a safe distance from “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29)?

These are questions for our individual and collective consciences. We are accountable to the One who has said:  “Behold, I make all things new”  (Rev. 21:5).

*

It is wrong to identify Christian faith as “revolutionary” in a worldly sense, as if it were only a means for attaining certain temporal goals. Yet it is equally wrong to act as though our faith were primarily a counter-revolutionary or conservative force.

Christianity is principally a revolution from within: a renewal and reshaping of man’s inner life — and consequently, his entire way of living — through communion with the Incarnate God. It is the spiritual melting-down and re-forging of humanity, in the furnace of Christ’s Paschal Mystery.

And this inner revolution, when it occurs, cannot remain purely private. It is to become manifest: through self-sacrificing love, all-encompassing solidarity, and a re-sacralized relationship to the whole creation.

If our faith is not transformative, then it is nothing: it would be only an assemblage of precepts and observances, combined with a set of obscure, inaccessibly abstract doctrines.

Unfortunately, that is exactly how Christianity appears to many outsiders — and perhaps even some frustrated adherents! — in our time. And one cannot place all of the blame for that perception upon them. If our lives show no sign of Christ’s transforming power, then we are witnesses against the truth rather than for it.

In his challenge to the Church, Kierkegaard was fundamentally correct: a complacent, self-satisfied “Christendom” may be in a worse spiritual state than an unevangelized society. If we claim that God’s Messianic Kingdom is present among us, the world expects to see something more than just another religious institution going through the motions from week to week. The sins of believers are a scandal to the outside world; but our respectable mediocrity is at least as scandalous, if not moreso.

It is likewise scandalous, that Christians should regarded in the public square as if they were primarily the partisans of convention and the “Old Time Religion.” There are things in our civilizational heritage that should be conserved; but our faith is not a defensive, rear-guard action against modernity. Chesterton,  who resented being called a “conservative,”  was right in this regard: Christians should care about the “permanent things” — virtue, beauty, truth — not because they are old, but because they are always new.

Monasticism, the vocation I am pursuing, is a good example of this. Tradition regulates the monk’s life: he prays the services as they have been prayed for centuries; he adheres to customs dating back a millennium or more. Yet the overarching goal is an ongoing inner renewal. Tradition is not an immersion in the past, but the gateway to that absolute Reality which is eternal and timeless — the reality of God.

Tradition is needed, both in the Church and in society at large; but it is not an end in itself. Paradoxically, we need tradition for the sake of constant renewal. Tradition is meant to wake us up, to change us, to unite us with the Lord who “makes all things new.” It is a  leaven  and not simply a preservative.

Christ is the reconciler of all things that should be harmonious, yet have fallen into discordance. In him, and his holy Church, man’s instincts toward both tradition and revolution — instincts in constant tension with each other, in the ordinary human world — are reconciled to one another, and both are fulfilled. Stability and creativity become compatible and interdependent.

A Christian revolution — a social and cultural manifestation of the Eternal Kingdom — cannot take place without the historic Christian tradition. But that tradition, reciprocally, cannot be practiced in truth without at least the implicit desire for such a revolution: the revolution of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, the revolution that frees us definitively from the prison of ourselves and our sins.

The world does not want such a revolution; and that is to be expected. But if the Church does not want God’s revolution, then we have a much more serious problem on our hands — a crisis that can only be overcome through bold acts of faith and love.

Credit to  Benjamin Mann of CatholicExchange.

By: Fr. George W. Rutler

A rich experience in my life was knowing Father Stanley Jaki,  the Benedictine priest and physicist who did much to explain the dependency of modern physical science on Christianity’s perception of the universe. He received the Templeton Prize, a monetary award larger than a Nobel Prize, for explaining how the scientific method issues from the Judeo-Christian concept of a benign and ordered universe.

While priests are dedicated to theology as the “queen of sciences,” some of them have contributed to the material sciences as well. Some days ago Google rightly honored Nicholas Steno whose research in stratigraphy earned him the sobriquet “Father of Geology.” Google did not mention that he was a convert to Catholicism in 1667 and only ceased his research due to pastoral obligations when he became a bishop in 1677. His scientific achievements were not as important as his heroic virtue, for which Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988.

The scientific lobe of my brain is lax, and buttoning my cassock is a complex challenge,  but I enjoy thinking of my fellows in the priestly fraternity who advanced our knowledge of God’s creation. As a student, I practiced the piano on the site where the Franciscan Roger Bacon,  Doctor Mirabilis  – “Wonderful Teacher,” explored mathematics, optics and astronomy in the thirteenth century. His own teacher is thought to have been Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln who gave the basic structure for scientific experimentation. In the sixteenth century, Ignazio Danti, an Italian bishop, made discoveries in engineering, cartography, hydraulics and astronomy. On his heels came a French priest, Marin Mersenne, a friend and fellow student of Descartes. He pioneered attempts at a formula representing all prime numbers and established an international scientific congress. His contemporary, Father Jean-Felix Picard, is known as The Father of Modern Astronomy and was the first to measure accurately the size of our planet.

The nineteenth-century Augustinian abbot  Gregor Mendel fathered modern genetics, discovering dominant and recessive genes as a high-school teacher. His contemporary, a missionary priest named Armand David, specialized in zoology, botany, geology and paleontology in China where he discovered, among other things, the Giant Panda. An American son of Belgian immigrants, Father Julius Nieuwland, invented the first synthetic rubber material by first polymerizing acetylene into divinylacetylene. Belgian native Father Georges Lemaitre proposed the Big Bang Theory which he called the First Atomic Moment, and influenced Einstein. Still living is Father Michal Heller of Poland, whose research in general relativity theory and quantum mechanics was recognized, like Father Jaki’s, with a Templeton Prize.

The liturgical season of Ordinary Time witnesses to the creation  ordered by our Creator, the Father of all thought: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; and before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you” (Jeremiah 1:5).

Credit to Fr.  George W. Rutler of CatholicExchange.