A collection of essays

 

For the past several months I have been completing a history of my Franciscan province. It will soon be self-published by "iUniverse" of Bloomington, Indiana and will be available with the title "Cura Animarum: The Sacred Heart Province of the Order of Friars Minor in North America: 1858-2023." During these months I have dashed off a few short essays, which I decided to share here.

 

 

Am I a fool?

 

This whole religion business still seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?

This has to be one of the questions at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are "spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist. Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.

Are we?

I have grown up and lived my life cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.

"Called." Who is calling?

 

Prayer

One of the central behaviors of religious people is prayer. What is prayer?

Prayer is communicating with the divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have been given to us by other people.

There have been more than one individual who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.

We do not know the complete story of the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God, however we perceive God?

Our critics fault us for being too willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for that claim?

I assume, without consulting such critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply, does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions of us are deceived about God?

Years ago I read a little of Sigmund Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people, "Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)

The advice "Grow up" is a moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?

I suspect it is the experience of most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see the world as it is. We are infantile.

 

Community

Our U.S. culture says that it is better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a particular group of people.

Religions, by definition (the word comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice religion.

There is increasing evidence that, at all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with other people than to be alone.

So, to answer the question that I began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture. I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me that too much individualism is not healthy.

I still admit that I could be wrong. I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a deceiver.

Faith is to know something even when you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by ourselves.

The prevalence of "fake news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a college education is to get you a good job. 

If I believe somebody who tells me that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe somebody who tells me what God is like?

Probabilism and the transgender penitent

 

I studied moral theology in the early 1960s. At that time there was an interpretation of the sacrament of "confession" that saw the priest-confessor as a judge. I think the interpretation was based on John 20:23, where Jesus said, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained." Your job as a confessor was to judge whether the penitent's sins should be forgiven or retained (not forgiven).

If the confessor was to be a judge, the confessor had to be educated to give sound judgments. Thus arose a system of reasoning called "probabilism."

The system depended on the availability of a set of moral theology authors, some of whom would say a particular behavior was permissible, and some would say it was sinful. That in itself strains credibility. How many confessors would have a shelf of moral textbooks? Confessors would not have such a shelf, but moral theology professors would, and moral theologians taught in seminaries.

When a penitent confessed that he had had a vasectomy, the confessor was to consult the shelf of authors who discussed vasectomy. If only one author said that vasectomy was forbidden, the confessor should refuse absolution. The probabilist would say that even if there are only a few authors who permit the surgery, while the majority forbade it, the confessor should still grant absolution. There would be at least some probability that vasectomy was not sinful.

Franciscan tradition favored probabilism. When in doubt, judge in favor of the penitent. That was the bottom line.

We simply do not know enough about transgenderism to make dogmatic statements about what is moral and what is not moral about it. What we do know is that there are more people who claim transgender experience than there used to be. There are people who were labeled male at birth but who experience the world from a very early age as a female would experience it. Those people tell us that they are not deliberately faking the experience, and they are not being deceived by medical people out to make a profit.

So what do we do with such people?

We wait while experience accumulates. Science moves slowly. To prove something is harmful requires much careful research done honestly. In time we will know what is harmful and what is not. But until then, we should err in favor of the person claiming to be transgender. We should honor their description of their experience. To do otherwise disrespects them. Disrespect is not loving.

To use the old language, there is a probability that accepting transgenderism is harmless, and so anyone in a position to pass judgment on it should err in favor of the transgender person. We could be wrong, but only time will tell.

Serious study of sexuality is not more than a century old. There is much that we do not know. An appeal to "natural law" is irrelevant when nature creates a condition. When that happens, our attitude should be, "Withhold judgment, wait for good research, and in the meantime do not accuse people of acting immorally."

To do otherwise makes us risk the Galileo error. The Church rushed to judgment and condemned Galileo, and it took centuries for popes to apologize. We shouldn't do that again.