Napoleon used to say that to understand a man look at what was going on when he was twenty. I am afraid that in Pope Leo we have the embodiment of felt banner Catholicism of the seventies.
LeoWatch: Presentism
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
As I’ve pointed out before, Pope Bob marched with Italian communists against his own country in the early 1980s, protesting Ronald Reagan’s deterrent response to Soviet communist installation of SS-20 intermediate range nuclear ballistic missiles in Warsaw Pact countries. He NEVER ONCE protested against Soviet nuclear aggression. He is STILL that kind of man today. All his blather about inequalities, barriers, and discrimination is the Marxist nonsense of diversity, equity, and inclusion. May God Almighty depose and anathematize him and all his works.
The problem with that approach is suggesting the real problem in the story was discrimination that the woman had to overcome. Which suggests, however subtly, that Jesus was guilty of perpetuating this form of discrimination. I remember this came up a few years ago following the 2020 George Floyd protests, where apparently some were suggesting racism is so universal that even Jesus was guilty of it, citing this story as the example.
Presentism.. judging people of long ago through modern worldly standards.
truly not hiding their modernist beliefs anymore.. . in order to accomplish this the past teachings of (at least) five popes condemning modernism must be obscured… plus 19 1/2 centuries..
go on the offensive… ask a parishioner if they’ve heard of Pascals Wager.. and if so… ask if they’ve heard of the Antiquity Wager (that is 19 1/2 centuries can’t be wrong!)
Well, he was 20 in 1975. What I remember from the era was (1) enervating inflation, (2) chronic trouble in the market for fuels, (3) junk cars serviced by sketchy repairmen, (4) half your friends with parents living apart from each other, (5) the wretched aesthetics of everything (haircuts, clothes, interior decor, cars, graphic arts, commercial development), (6) insipid television comedy recorded on videotape, (7) the sudden appearance of gamy language everywhere, (8) your teachers pushing tedious novelties like the metric system, and (9) a general sense of entropy. The amusing side consisted of certain performers (David Bowie, Gladys Knight, Al Green, Gary Wright, Monty Python), and, of course, the bicentennial minutes.
“inequalities, discrimination, barriers…”. I understand ghost writers work to mimic the voice of their client. They’ll write as if it were Donald Trump or Tracy Austin or whomever speaking to you. So, you have some administrative microbe who runs the Pope’s twitter account, who, presumably, is tasked with sounding like Leo. Distressing.
Add Hootenanny Masses at the Newman Center. At our church the Spanish Mass can have a guitarist and on special feasts a Mariachi band. Only once has a guitarist been allowed to peform, that was at a funeral Mass.
Well, on 1075 I was 11. My dad bought a new Ford Galaxie station wagon the year before. Most of what I remember that year was good times, outside of school, except that I lost my dear German Shepherd Lady, who was with me since I was a baby.
Saigon fell. There were the Vietnamese boat people, few if any cared much for them. Gas prices had stabilized at 50 to 55 cents per gallon…and that was expensive back then.
Ford built the Pinto, which got a bad rap in the media for exploding in a rear end collision when the square body GM pickup trucks were far worse (but GM got away with it) and Toyota, Datsun, Honda and VW (the front wheel drive Rabbit came out in 1975) started eating away at Detroit’s market share. The United Rubber Wirkers went on strike against the Big Four tire companies…Goodyear, Firestone, BF Goodrich and General. They ended up with a 25 cent an hour wage increase and soon after, due to the Advent of the radial tire, the tire manufacturing around Akron, Ohio vegan to disappear. This foreshadowed the closing of the steel mills around Youngstown just a few years later, as cars were made smaller (GM downsized starting in 1976 and steel demand began to decrease). There were “memorable” groups like The Captain and Tenille and Bobby Vinton’s Melody of Love with Polish lyrics my grandmother loved.
The truth of the matter is that you can look back at any era and find schlock. The 1980s had synthesizer driven British pop everywhere and young women finally abandoned the Dorothy Hamill haircut for hair to heaven held up with a can of Aqua Net.
The 1950’s? Greasers, fake ponytails and gargantuan fins on cars. The Sixties requires too much space and time.
Our Holy Father appears to be a person shaped more by his life among the poor in Peru, influenced by liberation theology and a lack of understanding of the Church elsewhere in the world. Cardinals Roche and Fernandez are intellectual roadkill lacking the wisdom to come inside when it is raining…yet they remain.
Instead of being pleased at the growth of the TLM in the US and elsewhere, with large families and people connecting or reconnecting to the Faith, they treat it as if it were an infected boil on the keester of Vatican II.
Huh. 2001 is when I turned 20.
Wonder what that says about me.
Dave,
There is a Lutheran church that broadcasts their services on the radio. I caught one where the pastor literally and explicitly said that the women in this story overcame Jesus’s racism, i.e. that she convinced God Himself to change His mind due to her superior wisdom. The pastor then started talking about his wife and times that she got things to go her way saying that she also was just as wise and that the two of them were just as much crusaders against discrimination. The clear implication (though this wasn’t said explicitly) was that he and especially his wife were also wiser than God.
All that being said I don’t think that Pope Leo is saying the same thing here. Certainly it could lead to that interpretation, but nothing in his words (or perhaps more likely, the words of whoever wrote the tweet) says that Jesus’s mind was changed by the women’s actions. The closest the tweet gets is the phrase “thanks to her faith” but this could also mean that she gave Jesus the opportunity to make a point by being faithful, not that she changed His mind.
I note that since his elevation, L 14 seems to be attempting to build bridges to merge controversy and virtue. Possibly he should be reminded that when authorities attempt to do this it is often referred to as a bridge to nowhere.
Mr. Harrier, I heard a variation on that same heresy in a homily yesterday. The priest said that the Canaanite woman, “through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit”, led Jesus to understand for the first time that His mission was “para todos, todos, todos”. This specimen is a retired priest, just two years older than I, and the instruction the good sisters had given us both at our parish school more than sixty years ago should have kept him saying anything so foolish. Unfortunately he went to the seminary and, well ….
I don’t know, I think it’s pretty solid. There are plenty of inequalities, discrimination and barriers that trample on people’s dignity that I can immediately think of:
1. In western nations there has been an expansion of the bloodlust of abortion/human sacrifice; not too many days ago a putative Catholic signed a law which enshrined in the law the ability to dismember, crush the skull, inject with flesh decaying poison, or suck out the brains of fully developed humans, and these humans are defenseless and innocent. Is there a greater inequality or power differential than that to address?
2. In many of these same nations there has been a generational form of wage slavery imposed upon the nations children from the moment of their birth, so that a fair percentage of their production is extracted at gunpoint to maintain the lifestyles of the older citizens, and often the burden is increased continually and exponentially for the same purpose. Why should younger people be discriminated against in this manner?
3. In many nations the most vulnerable (such as young girls) are subject to untold horrors by imported populations whose worldview is demonic and who not only have no intention of assimilating, but deliberately desire to supplant the native culture. Why should such blatant colonialism be allowed to trample on the dignity of such vulnerable people, especially as the parents are also forced at gunpoint to fund the destruction of their own families and culture?
4. Not long ago nearly all churches were closed and the sacraments kept from the faithful, despite these same sacraments being the source and summit of the faith. Yet their being deemed non-essential has not seemingly generated much contrition or many apologies. Seems like a particularly good opportunity to address barriers which trampled on vulnerable people’s dignity.
5. Similarly, at the same time people around the world were psy-oped, morally cajoled, and in many cases threatened with their livelihoods for not taking an experimental shot whose greatest efficacy seems to be causing miscarriages in first trimester pregnancies. The inequality and discrimination of this act, not to mention the blatant trampling on the dignity of some of the most powerless and vulnerable by the most powerful, seems like a prime candidate to address.
6. Some of the most marginalized Catholics had their masses shut down and the principle of solidarity absurdly abused even to the extent of regulating bulletin info, with a justification that was at least partially fabricated. This also seems like a great inequality and form of discrimination to address.
A quick list that could be readily expanded. So yeah, I say let’s roll with it and start addressing inequalities, discrimination and trampling on the dignity of so many.
Rudolph, I’d say nothing in his words says his mind was changed. But by dropping the last paragraph about discrimination, it links the woman’s plight to that, and by implication, Jesus therefore going along with the same. Whether he changed his mind or no, that is a contemporary spin on the story. Just like the idea that Jesus was no more able to escape the prejudices or bigotries of his age. Hence some feminist scholars will point to his only appointed men as apostles as showing that Jesus could not escape such gender discrimination. Same here. Again, one doesn’t have to follow Pope Leo’s words to that conclusion, but many do.
Speaking of the 70s brings the ever-old New Age to mind. In that context, tend to see the exchange not as xenophobia, but as an examination of faith. Does she possess faith, or is she, basically, guru-shopping, looking for the next Enlightened One, the next chant, the next “sacred herb”, the next crystal, mandala, whatever to cure her problems? Admittedly, the problem is real, but the quest to solve it can be a long wade through very shallow water. Anyway, the question is, does she have faith, or is she grasping out for the newest spiritual shiny object? In her case, she had faith, and may that be a lesson to us all.
Saint John Chrysostom has a good homily on Matthew 15:21-28:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200152.htm
“The problem with that approach is suggesting the real problem in the story was discrimination that the woman had to overcome.”
Take Jesus’ words at face value. Jesus did not speak fantasy.
“Exegesis and eisegesis are opposite ways of reading and understanding a text, especially holy books like the Bible. Exegesis means pulling the true meaning out of the text by looking at history and grammar. Eisegesis means pushing your own personal ideas into the text to make it say what you want” (Nelson University)
Pope Bob’s scriptural training in the 1980’s, skewed in service to the predominant idea of the destructive “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Paulo Freire) shows itself again.
The permanent deacon at our parish, who is a retired law enforcement officer, opened his Sunday homily with a reference to one of his favorite crime/detective novels- the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly. In one of these stories a colleague asks Bosch about three pictures of young women that he keeps on his desk. Bosch says they were all unidentified murder victims (quite possibly prostitutes, homeless, drug addicts or some combination of these) who had no names, no known survivors, and no one to attend their burials. When asked why he kept these pictures, Bosch replies “Because either everybody counts, or nobody counts.” From which the deacon then segued to the readings that emphasized salvation being for all people, not just the Jews, because in God’s eyes “everybody counts or nobody counts”. Now that could be applied to many current issues regardless of one’s political or social leanings, with no buzzwords necessary.