A grande dívida - por Nuno Serras Pereira

21. 03. 2014

Portugal tem uma dívida muito maior do que aquela de que se fala habitualmente. E é de justiça que tome consciência disso. Mais ainda, somente aproveitará e se recomporá se a reconhecer, agradecer e corresponder a quem tanto fez por nós.

Deus suscitou entre nós um generoso guerreiro que, como S. Paulo, combateu o bom combate – um valente, um bravo, cheio de Fé e de audácia – com uma inteligência perspicaz, uma capacidade de liderança singular e uma habilidade organizadora exímia. Exemplar na luta pela Justiça, um modelo de Caridade e de Misericórdia. Não só cuidou dos feridos como intrepidamente, na linha da frente, se opunha aos exércitos do Maligno para que não fizessem mais vítimas.

Num tempo em que tantíssimos poderosos se têm empenhado feroz e encarniçadamente contra a vida, o matrimónio, a família, a liberdade de educação, o cristianismo (e outros tantos covardes ou indiferentes se demitem da sua humanidade e da sua Fé), raros, se é que alguém, como ele se entregou com tamanha generosidade e competência à defesa, consolidação e promoção destes princípios inegociáveis que são os fundamentos do Bem-comum, da sociedade e da política, no seu sentido mais nobre.

Deus que tanto lhe deu para acudir a tantos não o poupou, como a Seu Filho, à Cruz. Assim como durante a maior parte da sua vida o fez participante dos Mistérios da Sua vida pública, nos últimos tempos quis fazê-lo participante da Sua Paixão em favor da nossa Salvação. Nestes tempos de grande configuração ao Crucificado poderíamos aplicar-lhe, analogicamente, o que o P. António Vieira disse de Cristo crucificado: “Nunca fez tanto, como quando nada fez”. 

Tenho para mim, sem a pretensão de me antecipar ao juízo da Igreja, que o Fernando Castro, que Deus ontem chamou a Si, participa já da Sua Glória; e que com a sua intercessão nos fortalecerá para continuarmos a missão que com tanta bondade e verdade desempenhou.

Deus compadecido das nossas misérias deixou-nos a Leonor (das Dores), sua mulher, e uma trezena de filhos para nos continuar a favorecer com as Suas Graças. À honra e glória de Cristo. Ámen.

Does Faith = Hate? - Gay marriage and religious liberty are uneasy bedfellows - by Rod Dreher

In CERC

This summer's Windsor decision from the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, but it did not declare a constitutional right to gay marriage.  Yet even Maggie Gallagher, the country's most tireless and high-profile opponent of same-sex marriage, now believes such an outcome is a foregone conclusion.

"It's clear that the courts are going to shut down the marriage debate and impose gay marriage uniformly," she says.  "There is not yet a unified sense of where we go from here, except for this: there is an accelerating awareness that the consequence of marriage equality is going to be extremely negative for traditionalist Christians."

Interviews with legal scholars, activists, and other social and religious conservatives involved in the fight against same-sex marriage confirm this grim outlook.  In the courts, and in the court of public opinion, the momentum towards same-sex marriage has been clear.  A consensus is emerging on the right that the most important goal at this stage is not to stop gay marriage entirely but to secure as much liberty as possible for dissenting religious and social conservatives while there is still time.

To do so requires waking conservatives up to what may happen to them and their religious institutions if current trends continue — and Catholic bishops, say, come to be regarded as latter-day Bull Connors.

Will religious conservatives be seen as no better than racist bullies in the emerging settlement?  Despite what you haven't heard — the news media's silence on religious liberty threats from same-sex marriage is deafening — this is not slippery-slope alarmism.  The threat is real.

Robin Fretwell Wilson is a University of Illinois law professor and religious liberty expert.  Though she takes no position on same-sex marriage, Wilson argues that religious freedom is enormously important in this fight.

"Everybody knows that [church] sanctuaries are going to be out of the reach of same-sex marriage laws," she says.  "The whole fight is over religiously affiliated organizations and individuals who are in government employment or out in commerce."

Religious schools and charities could suffer penalties such as the loss of government funding or state credentials necessary to operate.  They could also have their tax-exempt status taken from them.

The latter actually happened to a group of New Jersey Methodists in the 2007 Ocean Grove case.  That state court decision held that the New Jersey government was permitted to withdraw a special tax exemption, tied to public access, from a church-owned pavilion that declined to host two gay commitment ceremonies.  What happened next, says Wilson, set an ominous precedent.

"The local taxing authority then removed the local exemption for ad valorem taxes for the pavilion, and then billed them for back taxes," she says.  "That tax benefit is one of the most substantial benefits religious groups receive from the government.  Although the group had elected a local tax status tied to public access, if state and local governments use this as a guide for how to deal with religious organizations that don't accept same-sex marriage, that could be a big deal."

Individual religious believers also stand to lose their jobs or have their businesses take to court.  Christian florists, photographers, and bakers have already been sued or punished under nondiscrimination law for refusing to provide wedding or commitment-ceremony services to gay couples.  State courts in New Mexico have upheld a $6,000 fine levied against a wedding photographer who declined to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony.  Civil litigation underway in Colorado pits a gay couple against two Christian pastry chefs who refused to bake a cake to celebrate a wedding the pair held in Massachusetts.

In these cases, state nondiscrimination laws did not carve out religious liberty exceptions.  Though many observers focus only on Supreme Court rulings, Wilson says instances like these highlight the importance of marriage battles in state legislatures.

"When same-sex marriage gets dropped out of the sky, it doesn't drop onto a blank slate, but into the existing substrate of state anti-discrimination laws," she explains.

This belies the claim by marriage-equality activists that same-sex marriage is merely a simple expansion of marriage rights and that no one who opposes it will suffer undue hardship.

But if gay activists understate the threat same-sex marriage poses to religious freedom, chicken-little traditionalists sometimes overstate their vulnerability.

Wilson points out that the courts have expressed support for what they deem reasonable accommodation of religious belief, even when that belief clashes with civil rights claims.

"The idea that this is all of a sudden some newfangled thing where we're having to think through for the very first time how religious organizations are having to deal with civil rights norms is just not true," says Wilson.

Wilson and others engaged in this debate have suggested detailed legislative remedies attempting to balance gay rights and religious liberty for the common good.  She concedes, however, that the 1960s civil rights template is of limited use in thinking through religious liberty vis-à-vis homosexual rights.  Those laws were written in a time in which no one could have imagined them being used to question the gender structure of marriage.

Until now, the debate has focused on the question, "What is marriage?"  But henceforth it is coalescing around the question, "What is homosexuality?"  Or, to be more specific:  is homosexuality the same thing as race?  The future of religious freedom depends on how the courts, and the country, answer that question.

To gay marriage supporters, homosexuality is, like race, a morally neutral condition.  Opponents disagree, believing that because homosexuality, like heterosexuality, has to do with behavior, it cannot be separated from moral reflection.  As Gallagher put it in a 2010 paper in Northwestern University's law journal, "Skin color does not give rise to a morality."

The problem for traditionalists is that the sexual revolution taught Americans to think of sexual desire as fundamental to one's identity.  If this is true, then aside from extreme exceptions (e.g., pedophilia), stigmatizing desire, like stigmatizing race, denies a person's full humanity.  To do so would be an act of blind animosity.

Though she appealed in that same law journal paper to the magnanimity of gay rights supporters, Gallagher acknowledged that their confidence that homosexuality is no different from race would make compromise morally indecent.  Americans, she wrote, "do not draft legislative accommodations for irrational hatred."

This is largely why the Supreme Court majority struck down DOMA: the 5-4 majority saw it as motivated only by an unconstitutional desire to stigmatize and injure homosexuals.  Though Chief Justice John Roberts's dissent highlighted the majority's explicit endorsement of the right of states to define marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that this was only because his anti-DOMA colleagues didn't think they could get away with going further — for now.

That's why some leading traditional-marriage activists insist that the movement must continue to press arguments on the marriage question itself, even as religious liberty takes center stage in their political and policy strategizing.

The Heritage Foundation's Ryan T.Anderson is one of the top theoreticians of the traditional-marriage movement.  Anderson has become a high-profile advocate of applying natural law thinking to the marriage debate.  His view, in short, is that traditional marriage recognizes anthropological truths about human nature and therefore is critical to building stable societies in which to rear children.  Accepting same-sex marriage, he says, requires a philosophical shift that erodes the solid ground on which traditional marriage stands.

"The other side's lead talking point is that opposing gay marriage is the same as racial bigotry," he says.  "If this goes unresponded to, it will be no surprise if a majority of Americans eventually decide that they're right.  We're not there yet, but if that happens, the religious liberty protections we are able to lock in now will be very fragile."

Both Congress and the Supreme Court are sensitive to political reality.  Anderson says the court's refusal to constitutionalize gay marriage in its two rulings this term indicates that the justices are not willing to get out too far ahead of the country on this issue.

"Justice Scalia's dissent said it's just a matter of time until the other shoe drops," Anderson says.  "If it looks like the pro-marriage people have given up, the Supreme Court will be more likely to move quickly in usurping authority from citizens and redefining marriage for the entire country.  If Congress thinks we've surrendered, they will conclude that there's no point in extending religious liberty to bigots."

In Washington, a prominent religious conservative lobbyist sees Democrats increasingly energized around advancing gay rights, and Republicans "scared of the entire issue."

"They'll talk about these things behind closed doors and wonder where they are leading, but it's only a small group that's prepared to do anything about it right now," says Russell Moore, the new head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Moore, a 42-year-old pastor and theologian, has drawn favorable notice for taking a nuanced approach to culture-war issues.  He sees his task as not only communicating grassroots Evangelical concerns to political elites but also helping grassroots Evangelicals understand how radically circumstances have changed.

"The problem is that Evangelicals have taken a God-and-country, Moral Majority stance for so long, one that assumes the rest of the culture shares our values, and that it's only small groups of elites out there who are out of step," Moore says.

"I tell them you have to understand the mindset of the other side," he continues.  "They see this as the equivalent of the civil rights movement.  If the Christian definition of marriage becomes the equivalent of KKK ideology, then religious liberty will be very hard to defend."

This is why both the Windsor ruling and the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling that overturned anti-sodomy laws portend so much ill for marriage traditionalists.  Twice in the last decade, the Supreme Court found that laws restricting gay rights were based entirely on animus and served no rational purpose.  If the justices apply this reasoning to the core of marriage law, religious conservatives may well find little asylum outside the walls of their churches.

Hence the urgency of marriage activists on religious liberty.  Though same-sex marriage is almost certainly the wave of the future, the country isn't there yet.  In states where marriage equality is still under contention, traditionalists could take advantage of this divide to negotiate a settlement that both sides can live with — one that protects both religious institutions and religious individuals.  Time is on the gay-rights side, but its more pragmatic leaders may be persuaded that achieving basic marriage equality now is worth granting substantial protections to religious dissenters.

This is hard to do in a culture where religious conservatives are increasingly demonized for their beliefs about homosexuality.  And not just religious conservatives.  In August, Dartmouth withdrew its job offer to African Anglican bishop hired to run a campus spirituality and ethics center because of his past opposition to gay rights.  Though Bishop James Tengatenga, a widely respected and effective advocate for peace and reconciliation in his native Malawi, had since evolved into a gay-supporting liberal Anglican, the fact that he hadn't always been one cost him his job.

Granted, a New Hampshire liberal arts college is not America.  But stories like this help vindicate the hardline view of Princeton's Robert George that there is "no chance of persuading [gay-marriage proponents] that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree."

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman and gay-rights advocate Chai Feldblum agrees with George.  The former Georgetown law professor has written sympathetically about religious concerns, but he concludes that the clash between gay rights and religious liberty is a "zero-sum" affair.  People who don't see that are fooling themselves, she contends.

So, with the front in the gay-marriage culture war shifting to religious liberty, where do traditionalists stand?

George writes that they have to win this battle entirely or be crushed everywhere, as segregationists were, and for the same reason: their views will be deemed too abhorrent to be tolerated.  On this view, preserving religious liberty cannot be separated from preserving traditional marriage.

Wilson, a religious-liberty scholar, believes that there is room for compromise at the state level to protect religious liberty, and there are good prudential reasons for both sides to do so — but time is running out for the faithful to make deals in state legislatures.

Anderson, the think-tank philosopher, contends that the battle over the meaning of marriage is increasingly difficult but can be won.  In any case, he says, it must be waged to prevent an eventual rout for religious liberty. 

And Gallagher, the activist, no longer believes winning — that is, stopping gay marriage — is possible but insists, like Anderson, that conservatives cannot afford to surrender and accept their opponents' judgment of them as bigots and haters.

"Refusing despair is a powerful political weapon.  If we don't keep fighting, we are not going to be tolerated," says Gallagher.  In Windsor's wake, she is working to build legal and political institutions to help traditionalists endure coming hardships.

"The question we have to face is this:  did the Supreme Court give us Roe v. Wade, or Brown v. Board?" she says.  "If it's Roe, we lose, but our views of marriage will still be respectable.  But if we let it be Brown, we're in big trouble."

Il programma di Francesco. Partire dalla fede - di Massimo Introvigne

In NBQ

Quando nel 2010 Benedetto XVI rilasciò una lunga intervista al giornalista Peter Seewald, un cui passaggio subito ripreso dai giornali sembrava aprire all'uso degli anticoncezionali in circostanze particolari, Papa Ratzinger fece precisare dalla Sala Stampa vaticana che le interviste non sono Magistero. Implicitamente, Papa Francesco fa lo stesso all'inizio della lunga intervista raccolta dal suo confratello gesuita padre Spadaro, quando denuncia la sua grande difficoltà rispetto a questo particolare genere letterario. E - a proposito della sua più famosa conversazione con la stampa, quella sul volo di ritorno dalla Giornata Mondiale della Gioventù di Rio de Janeiro - ora afferma che «non ho riconosciuto me stesso quando, sul volo di ritorno da Rio de Janeiro, ho risposto ai giornalisti che mi facevano le domande».

Ci si potrebbe fermare qui, e far notare a chi - sinceramente o maliziosamente - cerca svolte e rivoluzioni nell'intervista del Pontefice a padre Spadaro che è il Papa stesso a invitarci a prendere un'intervista per quella che è, e a fare più volte riferimento nella conversazione a testi del Magistero - non solo suo, dai documenti del Vaticano II al «Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica» - come al luogo dove i fedeli possono trovare una trattazione sistematica e adeguata della dottrina.

L'intervista, però, non può neppure essere considerata irrilevante. Con la sua eco mediatica planetaria, è un grande evento sociologico. Se non è il luogo proprio dove cercare un insegnamento sistematico e magisteriale in tema di fede o di morale - e chi la intendesse così, sbaglierebbe - è però uno strumento utile a comprendere la «mens» e il programma pastorale e di governo del Pontefice. E, per ricavare da questo strumento quanto oggettivamente contiene, l'intervista va letta tutta. Le frasi isolate si prestano a qualunque tipo di equivoco, e talora di manipolazione.

Un esempio fra i tanti è l'affermazione: «Non sono stato certo come la beata Imelda, ma non sono mai stato di destra». Questa frase è stata sparata in prima pagina da quotidiani che ne hanno tratto pronostici su come si muoverà il Papa nella politica italiana: starà con Enrico Letta o con Renzi? Se però si legge tutto il paragrafo, si scopre che Francesco non sta parlando di politica ma del suo stile di governo come provinciale dei Gesuiti, quando era accusato di essere «ultraconservatore» per un certo autoritarismo giovanile, di cui oggi un po' si pente. Diventa allora ovvio che, nel contesto, l'espressione - sulla cui pertinenza e prudenza è più che lecito avere dubbi - «di destra» non equivale a «iscritto al PdL» ma a «superiore religioso che governa in modo autoritario e ultraconservatore». Del resto, se «destra» avesse un significato politico, ne conseguirebbe che la «beata Imelda» dovrebbe essere di sinistra. Ma si tratta della beata Imelda Lambertini (1320-1333), una fanciulla bolognese popolarissima in Argentina e che il Papa aveva già citato, beatificata non perché conterranea emiliana di Prodi ma per la sua mitezza e docilità.

Comprensibilmente - il Pontefice avrebbe potuto aspettarselo - la stampa mondiale ignora le numerose pagine dell'intervista dedicate all'arte, alla musica - dove Francesco discetta con competenza insospettata sui diversi esecutori di Richard Wagner (1813-1883), privilegiando Wilhelm Fürtwangler (1886-1954), non proprio un musicista di sinistra, tanto che fu inserito dal regime nazional-socialista nella lista dei suoi «artisti fondamentali» - alla letteratura, ai Gesuiti e - cosa più grave - anche alla teologia, per concentrarsi esclusivamente sulla singola risposta relativa ai divorziati risposati e agli omosessuali. Per la verità qualche «tradizionalista» critica anche una risposta un po' sbrigativa sulla Messa tradizionale - il Papa giudica prudente la decisione di Benedetto XVI, che riduce al concederne la celebrazione a chi ne sente il bisogno, ma chiede che non sia «strumentalizzata» per criticare il Concilio - tuttavia, la grande maggioranza dei commenti si concentra sui temi morali.

Dal punto di vista - strettamente umano e sociologico - del calcolo preventivo dell'impatto che la risposta su omosessuali e divorziati poteva avere sui media e sui loro lettori, la forma di comunicazione scelta si presta a più di una riserva quanto alla sua prudenza. Non è dunque obbligatorio apprezzarne il contesto: ma occorre almeno intenderlo. Francesco annuncia - lo aveva fatto in privato, in diversi incontri recenti - che non si tratta di ritardi o equivoci, e che effettivamente, pure consapevole che sarà criticato per questo, non intende parlare molto «delle questioni legate ad aborto, matrimonio omosessuale e uso dei metodi contraccettivi». Anzi, gli sembra che altri ne parlino troppo.

Perché questa scelta, che certo lascia molti perplessi? Il Papa spiega il suo programma: in un mondo molto lontano dalla fede preferisce ripartire dal primo annuncio. L'annuncio delle cose elementari: che Gesù Cristo è Dio ed è venuto per la nostra salvezza, che offre a tutti la sua misericordia, che convertirsi è possibile, che la conversione non è uno sforzo individuale ma passa sempre per la Chiesa. Il problema, per Francesco, è l'ordine logico, che diventa anche ordine cronologico nell'annuncio e nella missione. Prima viene «l'annuncio della salvezza». «Poi si deve fare una catechesi. Infine si può tirare anche una conseguenza morale. Ma l’annuncio dell’amore salvifico di Dio è previo all’obbligazione morale».

Benedetto XVI aveva detto a Lisbona, l'11 maggio 2010: «Spesso ci preoccupiamo affannosamente delle conseguenze sociali, culturali e politiche della fede, dando per scontato che questa fede ci sia, ciò che purtroppo è sempre meno realista». Il programma di Francesco è preoccuparsi per prima cosa «che questa fede ci sia», annunciarla attraverso il volto misericordioso del Signore che offre il suo perdono a tutti, compresi gli omosessuali «che cercano Dio», le donne che hanno abortito - ma che, ha detto il Papa, poi si sono «sinceramente pentite» - i divorziati risposati. Senza rigorismo, ha suggerito il Pontefice, ma anche senza «lassismo». Non che l'annuncio morale non faccia parte del messaggio cristiano, né - Francesco lo precisa - che egli pensi di cambiare la dottrina: «il parere della Chiesa [su vita e famiglia] lo si conosce, e io sono figlio della Chiesa». Ma l'insegnamento morale per il Papa viene dopo l'annuncio della salvezza tramite la misericordia di Dio. Invertire l'ordine dei fattori, partire dalla morale per risalire alla fede, oggi secondo Francesco non è più possibile, anzi lo stesso «edificio morale della Chiesa rischia di cadere come un castello di carte».

Tutte le strategie pastorali e di comunicazione hanno pregi e difetti, aprono possibilità di missione e comportano rischi. Non si manca certo di rispetto al Papa se si sottolineano anche i rischi, gravi, in un momento in cui in diversi Paesi - compresa l'Italia, e la legge contro l'omofobia ce lo insegna - per mettere la Chiesa ai margini della società l'attacco parte dalla morale. Il laicismo attacca la morale per distruggere la fede. È l'avversario ad avere scelto questo terreno di battaglia: prima l'attacco alla morale, poi quello alla fede. Papa Francesco pensa di non dovere accettare questa scelta del terreno di combattimento fatta da altri. Rovescia la logica del mondo, e parla d'altro: annuncia la compassione e la misericordia, al mondo mostra Gesù Cristo misericordioso e crocifisso, invita tutti a gettarsi per prima cosa ai suoi piedi.

Lo confermano tante inchieste sociologiche: sono tanti, in tutto il mondo, a lasciarsi commuovere da questo appello di Papa Francesco. Altri - magari i più impegnati sul fronte della battaglia per la vita e per la famiglia - da questa scelta strategica del Papa sono messi in difficoltà, e si sentono a disagio. Manifestare, con rispetto, questo disagio è normale: non significa non amare e non seguire il Pontefice. Una riflessione sul disagio può perfino diventare buona cultura e buona politica. Il disagio, invece, diventa sterile quando si esaurisce nel gossip, nella continua polemica, nell'abbandono della buona abitudine di leggere i discorsi e le omelie del Papa, anziché prendere da ogni Pontefice che Dio dona alla sua Chiesa quanto è davvero essenziale nel suo Magistero. Nel caso di Francesco, il cuore del Magistero è l'invito a «uscire» e ad annunciare la fede a chi non va in chiesa. Una fede di cui il Papa ci presenterà più raramente dei suoi predecessori - ci avverte prima, in esplicito, e sarebbe sbagliato far finta di non aver sentito o mascherare una chiara affermazione del Papa sotto spiegazioni cosmetiche - le conseguenze morali in ordine alla vita e alla famiglia. Ma queste conseguenze morali non vieta certo agli episcopati nazionali e ai laici di trarle dalla fede secondo logica e dottrina. Non solo ne ha dato l'esempio a Buenos Aires, quando come arcivescovo attribuiva addirittura all'«invidia del demonio» la legge argentina sul matrimonio omosessuale, ma da Papa ha più volte invitato i vescovi dei vari Paesi e i movimenti laicali a prendersi le loro responsabilità.

Nessuno potrebbe legittimamente invocare le scelte pastorali e la strategia di annuncio del Papa per sottrarsi a queste responsabilità. Ma tutti faremmo bene a riflettere pure su come Francesco ci chieda di collaborare anche all'annuncio ai più lontani della grazia salvifica e misericordiosa del Signore. «Uscire» e cercare chi è lontano dalla Chiesa o chi, nella Chiesa, si è intorpidito e addormentato - certo, senza trascurare altri temi - è un compito che il Papa non indica solo a chi ha tempo libero, o non è troppo distratto da altre cose. Lo indica a tutti, e a questo cuore profondo del suo Magistero tutti siamo chiamati ad aderire con convinzione.

Encíclica do Papa Francisco sobre a Fé

A Luz da Fé

Entrevista ao Arcebispo Jean Laffitte, Secretário do C. P. para a Família, por Mons. Duarte da Cunha

O Papa Francisco é o Cardeal J. Bergolio? - por Nuno Serras Pereira

12. 05. 2012

Para muitos parecerá abstrusa, se não mesmo absurda a interrogação que titula este pequeno texto. Pois se foi o Cardeal Bergoglio que foi eleito e aceitou ser Papa é evidente que são a mesma pessoa, exclamarão. Que sejam o mesmo e único ser humano concedo-o facilmente, mas que o Papa Francisco seja o Cardeal Bergoglio nego-o categoricamente. De facto, ao aceitar o encargo que o colégio eleitor cardinalício, assistido pelo Espírito Santo (n. b. – a Doutrina da Igreja não ensina que seja o Espírito Santo a escolher os Bispos de Roma; mas sim que Ele concede a Sua assistência aos Cardeais eleitores; os quais poderão estar abertos ou fechados à Sua inspiração), lhe confiou, deixou, de ser Cardeal e passou a ser o Santo Padre. Daqui que o ensino, o Magistério, o governo, as entrevistas, etc., do Cardeal Bergoglio não se podem confundir com as do Papa Francisco I. É certo que todo o seu passado, principalmente como Bispo, pode ajudar a compreender o seu ensino e proceder, mas não é menos verdade que poderá também ser uma dificuldade ou um estorvo para isso mesmo. Quem possua um conhecimento, ainda que superficial da história da Igreja e de teologia, sabe isto muito bem. Para não multiplicar os exemplos, recuando na história, basta lembrar que o Cardeal Ratzinger se manifestou contra a entrada da Turquia na União Europeia e que o Papa Bento XVI se pronunciou a seu favor; em cartas tornadas públicas, por consentimento dos próprios, um “líder” da Igreja Ortodoxa, amigo do Cardeal Ratzinger, escreveu ao Papa Bento XVI estranhando algumas das suas posições, que pareciam contraditórias com o que ele advogava enquanto teólogo e Cardeal; Bento XVI, na sua réplica, explicou que como Papa a sua vocação e missão tinha exigências e responsabilidades diferentes das de teólogo e Cardeal.

Jorge Bergoglio, como Cardeal e para alguns ainda mais como jesuíta (smile), não tem o carisma da infabilidade, muito menos numa mera entrevista; nem mesmo o Santo Padre o tem nessas circunstâncias. Ora na minha opinião, falível como é óbvio, o texto a que ontemfiz referência de Sandro Magister, tentando explicar a atitude actual do Papa Francisco, de se abster de distribuir a Sagrada Comunhão, com uma prática e entrevista sua, dada enquanto Cardeal, poderá gerar ruinosos equívocos; este teólogo vaticanista é lido no mundo inteiro, e seguido por eminentes teólogos, Bispos e Cardeais. Mais, estou em que a prática do Cardeal Bergoglio não era correcta e que a explicação que adianta na entrevista, que não é uma acto do seu Magistério Episcopal, padece de confusão ou de insuficiente compreensão doutrinal. Mas se o erro e a falha de entendimento são meus, renovo o pedido que ontem fiz: que me admoestem e corrijam. Não há nisto nenhuma espécie de ironia. Como não o há quando afirmo que submeto tudo quanto até hoje escrevi à autoridade da Santa Igreja e que estou disposto a que tudo seja reduzido a cinzas e lançado na imundície. Isto são declarações formais, sem sombra de astúcia ou simulação. Aliás, de há muito que escrevi, e tenho-o dito repetidamente, no dia em que alguém que seja dotado da autoridade para o fazer, me mandar que não escreva mais, fá-lo-ei imediatamente; poderei depois recorrer a instâncias superiores para verificar se a decisão é ou não confirmada; mas obedecerei prontamente, assim Deus me conceda a Sua Graça.

Variadíssimos leitores tiveram a amabilidade de me escrever no seguimento do texto que ontem enviei, uns agradecendo, outros louvando, outros ainda injuriando-me. A todos estou grato, principalmente aos que me acoimaram de soberba desmedida, gerador de hereges, etc., mais lhes fico reconhecido se rezarem por mim. Porém, apesar das arguições me serem proveitosas, parece-me que talvez não fosse pior que me enviassem textos argumentativos, mostrando-me os erros em que possa ter incorrido e explicando-me por que não tenho razão.

Acresce que alguns estão persuadidos de que a única coisa que me move é a defesa da vida. Estão enganados. A defesa da Fé, a Salvação das almas e da Santidade Eminentíssima da Eucaristia, raiz, centro, e cume da Igreja e de toda vida cristã são, julgava que era totalmente claro, o móbil essencial do que ontem redigi. Embora não ignore, como podia fazê-lo?, a defesa da vida que de resto, como o demonstrou, recentemente, com uma clareza e inteligência raras o Arcebispo G. Crepaldi, está intimamente vinculada com essas realidades.

Há, nos dias que correm, uma indiferença arrepiante para com as profanações e os sacrilégios eucarísticos. Chego a interrogar-me se muita gente, inclusive alguns prelados, acreditam mesmo (ou no mínimo se têm uma consciência suficiente) na Presença Real, na Majestade infinita de Deus, na gravidade do pecado mortal.

Pode um Papa ser corrigido? Desde que S. Pedro, o primeiro e o maior entre todos, esse sim directamente escolhido por Cristo, o foi, primeiro por um galo e depois por S. Paulo, não se vê razão para que outro não o possa também ser. Tem acontecido ao longo da história da Igreja.

The Family is the Key to the Future of Faith - by Mary Eberstad

In Standpoint

No institution can be counted upon to provide such operatic drama as the Catholic Church. February opened with sinister hints in the Italian media of yet more scandals involving sex and money within the Vatican bureaucracy's higher ranks. Then came the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the first such papal exit in some 600 years. This was followed in March by the (also unexpected) election to the papacy of the Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, one brimming with its own series of precedents: the first non-European Pope since the 700s, the first from the New World, and the first to choose the spiritually potent name and legacy of St Francis of Assisi as synecdoche for this surprising new pontificate.

For Catholics, their well-wishers in other faiths and perhaps even for some of their adversaries, it has all been an unavoidably diverting set of spectacles. Even so, the pageantry has obscured a rather sobering fact: it is continuity in the Church, rather than change, that is the real order of the day from Pope Francis I on down. In particular, the Church of tomorrow, like that of today, will inevitably find on its agenda a problem even more vexatious than the past decade of sex scandals, because even more intractable. It is a problem that Francis I will no more be able to avoid than was his predecessor — or other occupants of St Peter's Chair in years to come. 

That problem is the conundrum of Western secularisation. Certainly no one was more aware of its centrality than the retiring pontiff, Pope Emeritus Benedict. That great theologian and prophetic thinker made the re-evangelisation of Europe the cornerstone of his pontificate. This was true starting with his very name. As he explained, St Benedict of Nursia — founder of the Benedictine order that kept Christianity alive in the Dark Ages, and one of the two saints from whom he took his papal title — was chosen specifically because his life evoked "the Christian roots of Europe". 

Even before his election as Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had revealed a deep preoccupation with reclaiming Europe for God. Most notably, he engaged the grand old man of the German intellectual Left, Jürgen Habermas, in a debate on faith and reason that demonstrated their symbiosis and appeared as a book, The Dialectics of Secularisation. In 2010, on the feast day of St Wilfrid, who helped to re-evangelise the British Isles, Pope Benedict XVI further tried to institutionalise the battle against secularisation by creating the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation — a body specifically charged with countering what he called "a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church", and "an eclipse of the sense of God".

No issue, in sum, appears to have been dearer to Pope Benedict's heart. All of which raises a question entirely overlooked in all the global media attention lately focused on the Vatican: did he succeed in his mission? The answer, so far anyway, can only be: no. But the reason why deserves more illumination than it has received so far. It is hardly the Pope Emeritus's fault that the Church has not yet figured out what to make of secularisation. Modern sociology hasn't got it right, either.

The Catholic mission against Western secularisation has sputtered in part because the West, religious and non-religious, has laboured for many years now under what is at best an imperfect understanding of what "secularisation" really is. Until now, the Church has passively let secular thinkers tell the tale of how and why people stop believing in God — all of which would be fine if secular thinkers had succeeded in connecting those dots correctly. But the trouble is that they haven't, as is evident from several insurmountable logical problems that could not have been foreseen when Friedrich Nietzsche's madman first prophesied the death of God.

For one, consider the historical timeline. Secularisation has been understood by most great modern thinkers — and by plenty of mediocre ones — as a linear process in which religion slowly but surely vanishes from the earth — or at least from its more sophisticated precincts. As people become more educated and more prosperous, the collective story goes, those same people come to find themselves both more sceptical of religion's premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations. Hence, somewhere in the long run — Nietzsche himself predicted it would take "hundreds and hundreds" of years for the news to reach everyone — religion, or more specifically the Christianity once dominant on the European continent, will die out. 

Exactly which feature of modernity would put the final nail in the coffin has been unclear, but a representative list would include technology, education, material progress, urbanisation, science, feminism and rationalism, among the usual suspects. Once again, this process has been supposed by many to be inexorable. Like candles on a birthday cake the religious faithful, too, will sooner or later flicker out, one by one. 

The trouble with this widely accepted storyline is that it does not describe the historical reality of Christianity's persistence. The American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, who is a contrarian in these matters, opened a classic 1999 essay called "Secularisation RIP" with an entertaining review of predictions of the demise of Christian faith dating back to 1660 and continuing to the present day — including such secular soothsayers as Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, the anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace, the sociologist Bryan Wilson and other notables. As Stark wryly implies, none seems to have grasped the ironic fact that their own obituaries would be written long before the rest of the world stopped believing in God. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge suggest in their 2009 book God is Back, the Almighty has not expired on the timeline predicted by his would-be obituarists.

What secularisation theory has missed is this crucial historical fact: Christianity has not operated in a linear fashion at all. It has instead been cyclical — prospering in some places and declining in others according to a pattern that secular thinkers have neglected to explore. This includes periods of prosperity in this and the last century.

The Second World War was followed by a religious boom in every Western country. In an essay reviewing the role of religion in the British, American, and Canadian armies the British historian Michael Snape concludes that the soldiers of all three nations "were exposed to an institutional process of rechristianisation during the Second World War, a process that was widely reinforced by a deepening of religious faith at a personal level". This experience, he concludes, further reinforced "a religious revival that was stirring in the war years and which was to mark all three societies until the religious ferment of the 1960s". 

The British historian Callum G. Brown agrees. As he has put it, summarising evidence of a religious boomlet across the West in the mid-20th century, "Between 1945 and 1958 there were surges of British church membership, Sunday school enrolment, Church of England Easter Day communicants, baptisms and religious solemnisation of marriage, accompanied by immense popularity for evangelical ‘revivalist' crusades." That trend also held elsewhere in the Western world — in Australia, West Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. 

As for the United States, the same postwar religiosity appears in retrospect as the high-water mark of Christianity in America. So pronounced was public religiosity and so vibrant were the churches that Will Herberg, perhaps the foremost sociologist of religion in America during the mid-20th century, could observe in his classic book Protestant-Catholic-Jew: "The village atheist is a vanishing figure . . . Indeed, their kind of anti-religion is virtually meaningless to most Americans today . . . This was not always the case; that it is the case today there can be no reasonable doubt. The pervasiveness of religious identification may safely be put down as a significant feature of the America that has emerged in the past quarter of a century [emphasis added]." In the gap between his assessment of the religiosity of his day and our assessment of its decline less than 60 years later, we see once more that Christianity ebbs and flows even in the modern world, in ways more mysterious than first understood and that point away from the conclusion that decline is inevitable.

Nor has secularisation been synonymous with material progress, as a great many other people have supposed. Consider the significant variables of social class and education. Christianity, in the minds of many sophisticated secular people, is Marx's famous "opium of the masses" — a consolation prize for the poor and backward. Everyone "knows" that the better-off have less use for God than poor people, and that educated people have less use for religion, frankly, than do duller heads. Certainly that is a stereotype to which many people would assent — one rather flagrantly displayed in a notorious piece in the Washington Post in 1993 that described the followers of leading American evangelicals as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command".

 

Everyone "knows" these things — yet few people, especially those who use stereotypes like these to explain the weakening of Western Christianity, seem to know the empirical truth. Once again, if the conventional account of secularisation was sound — if it correctly predicted who was religious, and why — then we would reasonably expect that the poorer and less educated people were, the more religious they would be. So the fact that these stereotypes are not correct, and that the opposite has been the case in some significant instances, would appear to falsify conventional accounts of what happened to the prevalence of Christian belief.

The British historian Hugh McLeod's painstaking work on London between the 1870s and 1914, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, found that among Anglicans in London, "the number of . . . worshippers rises at first gradually and then steeply with each step up the social ladder." Put differently, "the poorest districts thus tended to have the lowest rates of [Church] attendance, [and] those with large upper-middle-class and upper-class populations the highest." In other words — and in contrast to the Dickensian image of the pious poor morally and otherwise outshining a debauched and irreligious upper class — reality among the populace seems to have been the opposite in Victorian London. "Only a small proportion of working-class adults," he observes, "attended the main Sunday church services" (Irish Catholics being the sole exception). Callum Brown, another expert on the numbers, makes the same point about religiosity in Britain during those years: contrary to conventional wisdom, "the working classes were irreligious, and the middle classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil morality." Much the same pattern can be found in the United States today — and it is one more pattern subversive of the idea that economic and intellectual sophistication are somehow the natural enemies of Christian faith, or that personal enlightenment and sophistication explain the current condition of Christian practice. 

A widely praised book by the political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, similarly refutes the notion that religiosity in the United States is a lower-class phenomenon. During the first half of the 20th century, the authors observe, the college-educated participated more in churches than did those with less education. This pattern changed during the 1960s, which saw church attendance fall off most among the educated. But following that "shock" there emerged another pattern, according to which attendance tended again to rise faster among the educated than it did among the less educated (or depending on how one looks at it, the drop in attendance then became more dramatic among the less educated than it was among those with college degrees). As Putnam and Campbell observe, "this trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays providing solace to the disinherited and dispossessed, or that higher education subverts religion."

In another wide-ranging recent book on American social class, Coming Apart: The State of White America, the political scientist Charles Murray analysed recent data on churchgoing, marriage, and related statistics to conclude that "America is coming apart at the seams. Not the seams of race or ethnicity, but of class." Most interesting of his proxies for our purposes was religion. The upper 20 per cent of the American population, data from the General Social Survey show, are considerably more likely than the lower 30 per cent to believe in God and to go to church. Among the working class, 61 per cent — a clear majority — either say they do not go to church or believe in God, or both; among the upper class, it is 42 per cent. "Despite the common belief that the white working class is the most religious group in white American society", Murray explains, "the drift from religiosity was far greater in Fishtown [his imaginary working-class community] than in Belmont [a better-off suburb]." As a headline on msnbc.com once pithily summarised research by the American sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin, "Who is Going to Church? Not Who You Think."

Titans of sociology such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber understood in their own ways what most thinkers today, including the new atheists, do not — why religion might, from a secular perspective, exist in the first place. But neither they nor their contemporary heirs gave satisfactory attention to this other question: what causes it to come and go? In all likelihood, most of them did not believe it could wax as well as wane. Yet the evidence suggests that Christianity has done just that.

So if the conventional accounts have been wrong about what drives some people away from church — money, education, personal enlightenment — why are the churches of Europe as empty as they are? Why do increasing numbers of young people in the West identify themselves as "none of the above"? What is the real causal force turning a civilisation that once widely feared God into a civilisation that in some places now widely jeers at him?

The answer, I believe, has to do with a variable so seemingly humble as to have been overlooked by the titans of sociology no less than by their many descendants. That variable is the human family — more specifically, the relationship between the health of the family and the health of Christianity. 

Consider once again the remarkable vibrancy of Christian practice across the West in the years following the Second World War — the religious boomlet much remarked upon by sociologists of the time, and still within living memory of some today. That boomlet was pan-Western in scope. It applied to the vanquished as well as the victorious, the neutral as well as everyone else, the economically devastated as well as the prosperous. So what explains it?

To study the timeline is to see that the years of postwar religiosity coincided precisely with another much-studied phenomenon of those years: the baby boom. Across the Western world, the war was followed by an increase in marriage and babies. Is it not just common sense to think that the baby boom and the religious boom went hand in hand — indeed, that each trend powered and reinforced the other in a way highly suggestive of this overlooked aspect of what makes Christianity tick?

In brief, the idea is that something about families (and in all likelihood, more than one "something") increases the likelihood that people will go to church, for all sorts of reasons: because they will seek out a like-minded moral community in which to situate their children; because the experience of birth, of simply being mothers and fathers, transports some into a religious frame of mind; because the idea of loving someone enough to die for him arguably comes more easily to the parents of the world than to mortals who do not know that primal bond. In these ways as in others, one can argue, communal life within the family might incline people toward religion generally, and specifically toward Christianity — a religion that begins, after all, with a baby and a Holy Family, and whose revolutionary notion that a valid marriage requires consent of both parties remains one of the most family-friendly human rights innovations of all time.

From the point of view of the new occupant of the Papal Apartments, as well as to his well-wishers in a time of flickering Western faith, there are two ways of looking at this new understanding of secularisation. On the one hand, the family is in parlous shape across the West. More people are being raised in broken homes; more are living alone; many are openly hostile to traditional Christian sexual morality, and legal norms not only in the West but across the world increasingly reflect that fact. All of these and related facts about the shattered hearth put up new barriers to religious belief. (To offer just one potent example, how does one explain the idea of God as infinitely loving father to someone whose own father has abandoned the home, and whose experience of other paternal figures is a series of Mom's abusive boyfriends?)

On the other hand, this new way of dissecting secularisation brings the heartening news that most secular thinking on the subject has got rather a big thing wrong: there is nothing inexorable about Christian decline after all. Family, like faith, fluctuates throughout the historical timeline. And surely the pragmatic, interlocked relationship between the two gives prospective New Evangelists something meatier to go on, perhaps, than they have had before. 

Specifically, because the churches need vibrant families — including families that reproduce themselves, as secular people tend not to do — they must also understand that strengthening the natural family is the first order of business in bringing people back to God. As has been amply documented by the British political scientist Eric Kaufmann in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and the American author Jonathan Last in What to Expect When No One's Expecting, believers have many more children than do non-believers. In an increasingly secular and childless age, the churches need to make that job easier.

This is not an abstract call to rhetorical arms, but rather one to grassroots efforts, one parish at a time, dedicated to all manner of things that might make family life easier or more attractive to secular people. More babysitting, support groups, marriage counselling, meal drop-offs, healthcare volunteering, car pools, prayer groups that double as social hours, free tutoring, and other seemingly humdrum but systematic efforts might do more to re-evangelise Western culture than all the pontifical councils in Rome.

Put differently, the welfare state has been an ineffective and hideously expensive substitute for the fractured Western family. If the churches are to succeed, they must compete successfully against it. 

This brings us to the fact that there are other forces at work that might also contribute inadvertently to religious revival. Will the almost certain collapse of some of the West's now untenable welfare states launch a massive return to the hearth? Will people tired of shrinking pensions and record unemployment rates and other factors that show the welfare state to be an inefficient substitute for the family make different familial decisions from those of their parents? In America during the years immediately following the 2008 crash, to offer small but intriguing suggestive evidence, divorce declined slightly, and young people moved back home rather than into the atomised life so characteristic of the generations of young adults before them. Could wider economic catastrophe itself spark a revival of the family — and with it, a revival of the Christianity that has for so long protected and nurtured the family even as it benefited from it? Those are the questions looming not only over St Peter's Square, but the entire Western world.