Pascal on the Jesuits

April 8, 2016 in Jesuits No Comments Tags: casuistry, Jesuits, Pascal, provincial letters

Pascal in the Provincial Letters has a character explain the motivation for the Jesuit’s casuistry by which they could excuse almost anything:

Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption now-a-days, that unable to make them come to us, we must e’en go to them, otherwise they would cast us off altogether; and what is worse, they would become perfect castaways. It is to retain such characters as these that our casuists have taken under consideration the vices to which people of various conditions are most addicted, with the view of laying down maxims which, while they cannot be said to violate the truth, are so gentle that he must be a very impracticable subject indeed who is not pleased with them. The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion, is never to repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.

Perhaps the cardinals should have read the Provincial Letters before the last election; or perhaps they did, and decided this was the policy they wanted.

It is a pity that John the Baptist did not follow this policy; he could have kept his head.

The Authority of the Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church

October 27, 2011 in Catholic Church, Jesuits, Medical ethics, Moral Theology 9 Comments Tags: eugenics, Nazism, Ordinary magisterium

Catholic progressives often criticize “creeping infallibility” and discount the authority of Church’s ordinary magisterium when it comes to sexual morality. Galileo is often cited. This approach has been used for other purposes.

Pius XI repeatedly condemned Nazi and Fascist racism, culminating in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.

The Italian fascist official Robert Farinacci went to the Nuremberg rally in 1938.

Emma Fattorini in Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican, writes that

Farinacci on that occasion countered the pope’s attack on the recent fascist racial manifesto by invoking the pope’s non-infallibility regarding scientific and terrestrial topics; just as the Church had erred in the case of Galileo, so it was mistaken regarding racial theory.

The German Jesuit eugenicist Hermann Muckermann took a similar approach when Pius XI condemned eugenics in Casti Connubii. Muckermann thought that the pope had no competence in scientific matters, and the Vatican would eventually realize that eugenics was scientific and valid.

My point: it is dangerous to dismiss constant Church teachings when one is influenced by contemporary attitudes that, in retrospect, are deeply pernicious. The incidents cited above should be a caution to those who dismiss every non-infallible teaching as essentially having no authority.

Ignacio Matamoros o Peregrino

February 7, 2011 in Camino de Santiago, Jesuits, Uncategorized 13 Comments Tags: Ignatius of Loyola, Santiago Matamoros, Santiago Peregrino

There is a well-known story about Ignatius of Loyola.

He was a soldier and, like Don Quixote, his favorite reading was books of chivalry. After he was wounded and recuperating all that he had to read was lives of the saints, and this reading led to his conversion.

After his conversion he was travelling to Montserrat on a donkey and met a Moor who scoffed at Mary’s perpetual virginity. What I had forgotten was that of course by this time there were no Moors left in Spain; they had all been expelled, so it must have been a morisco, an imperfectly converted Moslem. I just learned that moro also meant a sodomite.

Ignatius was seething, and the Moor went ahead. Ignatius was mulling whether to kill the Moor with his dagger for insulting Mary. Ignatius came to a crossroad and let the donkey choose the way. If the donkey chose the road that the Moor had taken, Ignatius would catch up with him and kill him. If they donkey chose the other way, Ignatius would let the matter go.

Fortunately for the Moor, the donkey chose the other path.

What I just learned was the last episode in this story.

When he finally arrived at Montserrat, Ignatius once and all for exchanges the dagger for a pilgrim’s staff at the altar of Our Lady.

Ulrike Strasser explains the significance of this:

The contrasting phallic images of dagger and staff are emblematic of a shift in masculine identities. The dagger stands for a life of warfare, aggression, and the defense of women’s honor. The pilgrim’s staff stands for a life of service to God, wandering the earth, forgoing violence. By trading one for the other, Ignatius is changed from a soldier to a soldier of Christ. He will continue to be brave but will now be brave on behalf of God. He will no longer think of “a certain lady” but pledge all his loyalty to the Queen of Heaven.

(Ulrike Strasser, “’The First Form and Grace’: Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Maculinity” in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds., Masculinity in the Reformation Era, p. 60)

What Strasser does not mention, but which must have been prominent in Ignatius’s mind, and which I could scarcely miss, having recently walked 500 miles on the Camino Frances, is that Ignatius is exchanging the model of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-Slayer) for Santiago Peregrino (St. James the Pilgrim).

No longer Ignacio Matamoros, but now Ignacio Peregrino, taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth.