PopeWatch: Causes

King David:
That soldier who laid his hands on the Ark – he was only trying to be helpful.

Nathan the Prophet:
It is not for us to question the ways of the Lord.

King David:
I question nothing, yet the sun was hot that day, the man had been drinking wine, all were excited when the ark began to fall. Is it not possible that the man might have died naturally from other causes?

Nathan the Prophet:
All causes are from God!

David and Bathsheba (1951) screenplay

Traditionally any great natural disaster would cause Catholics to ponder what God intended by this.  Contemporary Catholics resist, at all costs, the thought that God has sent something harmful, out of his anger with us.  Sandro Magister gives us an example:

”Prophets of doom.” This is how “La Civiltà Cattolica” – the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that goes to press after having been seen and approved by the pope – defines and dismisses those among the Catholics who are claiming that the coronavirus pandemic is “a punishment from God, enraged against a sinful world.”

It has done so in its latest issue, under the byline of a  Jesuit of the first rank, David M. Neuhaus, professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Jerusalem, born Jewish, a citizen of Israel and a convert in his youth from the Jewish faith to the Christian.

Neuhaus does not mention names. But it is clear that in his crosshairs are among others Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and Professor Roberto de Mattei.

There are above all two – Neuhaus writes – passages of the Bible that the supporters of divine punishment “bend for their own use and consumption.”

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The first is taken from chapter 24 of the second book of Samuel. And it is the story of the plague with which God punished the people of Israel for a fault committed by King David, that of having ordered a census with the presumption of considering as his own a people who instead belonged to God.

Although David repented, it says that “the Lord sent the plague to Israel, from that morning until the appointed time. From Dan to Beersheba seventy thousand people died among the people.” And only when the exterminating angel stretched out his hand over Jerusalem did the Lord say to the angel: “Enough now! Withdraw your hand!”

Indeed, the biblical image of the angel putting the sword back into its scabbard has been adopted by Christian art, which has repeatedly resorted to it in depicting the cessation of a plague. For example, in Rome, on the top of Castel Sant’Angelo (see photo).

But for Neuhaus it is wrong to keep to the letter of this account. Anyone who deduced from it that the plague and any other calamity are an instrument of divine punishment “would be making a warped interpretation of the text, ignoring both its historical and narrative context, the author’s intentions, and the underlying theological message.”

“The narrative of the census, in fact,” Neuhaus explains, “is part of a long history that begins with the entry into the promised land, in the book of Joshua, and moves uninterruptedly up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. This extensive saga, written around the middle of the sixth century BC, is the literary fruit of an author or a school of authors that scholars call ‘Deuteronomist.’ The burning problem of the time was that of meditating on the disaster of the destruction of the temple, which Solomon had built, and of the city of Jerusalem, with the consequent exile to Babylon. In short, the question that text answers is: How is it possible that God gave the land to Joshua and that this was lost with the Babylonian invasion?

“The whole Deuteronomist narrative tradition was written in a context of devastation: everything had been lost. The people had to re-read their own history to take responsibility for it and ask for forgiveness from God. The biblical page does not intend to affirm the plague as a divine punishment, but rather the need for the people – like David – to accept their responsibility for the events that led to the exile.

“Of course, according to the understanding of God in Scripture, which is always evolving, there is still a religious mentality here that tends to refer everything to God as the first cause and to connect every adversity with a sin committed by the individual or by others. After the subsequent ‘correction’ by the prophetic texts – for example Ezekiel – according to which each one pays only the consequences of his own sin, it will be Jesus who contradicts this religious logic of strict dependence between guilt and punishment, as in the case of the episodes of the tower of Siloam and the man born blind.”

Jesus speaks of the collapse of the tower of Siloam in chapter 13 of the Gospel of Luke: “Those eighteen upon whom the tower of Sìloam fell and killed them, do you think they were more guilty than all the inhabitants of Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but if you do not convert, you will all perish in the same way.”

While the healing of the man born blind is narrated in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, with the disciples asking Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, he or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus replies: “Neither he sinned nor his parents, but it is so that the works of God might be manifested in him,” that is, precisely his healing by the one who is “the light of the world.”

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The second biblical passage that Neuhaus wants to wrest from the hands of the “prophets of doom” is not from the Old but from the New Testament. It is in chapter 16 of Revelation, where “a heavenly voice orders seven angels: ‘Go and pour upon the earth the seven bowls of God’s wrath’,” meaning plague, fire, blood, darkness, and other terrible calamities.

Go here to read the rest.  Always seeing the Hand of God in everything that happens is an error.  God usually marks the sparrow’s fall, and doesn’t make the sparrow fall.  However, to engage in hand waving to get around Scripture that describes interventions by God in the affairs of Man is a greater error.  It understates the power of God, and avoids the inevitable conclusion that perhaps some calamities are sent by God to lead us to true repentance and faith in Him.  However, modern Man is resolute in the popular heresy that God loves us just the way we are, rendering the Cross an unpleasant oddity in the life of our good buddy Christ, who is dog-like in His eagerness to forgive whatever enormities we repeatedly commit.  Every generation attempts to remake God in its own image, and our current popular version of God, a sort of divine Barney the Dinosaur, does us no credit, here or in Eternity.