Not surprisingly, on his recent visit to Latin America Pope John Paul II repeated his condemnation of liberation theology. He said that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberation theology had died in Latin America.
In this assessment he was backed by Cardinal Nicolas Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, who said “the Holy Father is completely right.” Archbishop Ricardo Durand Florez of Peru, author of books critical of liberation theology, said, “the once powerful theological trend is now history.”
Not everyone agreed. Liberation theologian and former Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff told reporters, “Somebody made that line for him, because it is well known that other people write the Pope’s speeches. I even wrote some of his speeches in Brazil.”
Reminded that the words of the Pope were improvised in a press conference, Boff said, “The Pope is an opportunist because he knows that there are many people who still believe in the theology of liberation.”
As Cardinal Lopez Rodriguez replied, “There certainly are some people that still believe in [liberation theology], but they are just a corpse, a dead body.”
Latin America isn’t the only place afflicted with priests of a certain mindset. Fr. Frank Trenkenschuh, an anthropologist, has worked for 27 years with the Asmat people in Indonesia, and he was written up in a recent issue of National Geographic.
He explained to the journal’s reporter that “The Asmat believe that when they killed and ate a person, they became that person and absorbed his skills. This is similar, of course, to the Catholic belief that we eat the body of Christ to become Christ. So I say, ‘Look, you don’t have to go out and kill. You now have Christ.'” The 55-year-old priest ends by asking the reporter, “What are Catholics, after all, but ritualistic cannibals?”
Br. Bob Smith is a Capuchin monk and a former parole officer. He is also the principal of Messmer High School, once run by the Milwaukee Archdiocese but now independently operated. Smith completed an application to have his school participate in Parental Choice, a voucher program. What he got for his troubles was what The American Spectator characterized as an “inquisition” by representatives of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, who didn’t want a Catholic school to participate in the program.
A believing Catholic can sympathize with Smith while wondering what all the fuss was about, since by Smith’s own admission it appears that Messmer High School is in no identifiable way Catholic, even if it calls itself Catholic.
In order to pass muster with the DPI, Smith explained to the authorities, “We hope that any student we touch leaves our building being a good Christian, if they’re Christian; if they’re non-Christian, being a good non-Christian; if they’re an atheist, being a good atheist. We simply want to support whatever choice they make in regard to religion.
“But more, we want to help students choose to be good human beings. We are in no way out trying to get more members for the Catholic faith-and the evidence simply is that since the school’s reopened in 1984 [after being abandoned by the Archdiocese], we haven’t had a single Catholic [convert]. We haven’t talked about conversion; we haven’t had a baptism; we haven’t even mentioned it.
“What we’re more interested in is that students be given a solid education and walk out of here with some values — values that any human being should have.”
There is no indication that Smith modified his school’s purposes in trying to win participation in the voucher program. What he told the DPI representatives seems to have been his constant stand.
Although we can sympathize with him for having been discriminated against by bureaucrats jealous of their own positions (they don’t want to see the program succeed), how could any Catholic welcome Smith’s attitude?
“We simply want to support whatever choice they make in regard to religion.” This is not a statement of principle, but an abandonment of principle. The purpose of education, at any level, is to assist students in coming into an appreciation of the truth. Public schools by their very nature can do this only partially, even in the best of circumstances, but private schools, especially Catholic schools, are free to develop the whole person, spiritually as well as mentally. But is it spiritual development to welcome a student becoming a “good atheist,” whatever that is?
It’s a little embarrassing to read Smith boasting of never having made a convert, never having brought anyone to baptism, through his school’s teaching. What kind of Catholicism are the “good Catholics” among his students taught? Apparently an enfeebled Catholicism that doesn’t encourage non-Catholic students to wonder if the Catholics might be on to something and if that something might be worth investigating.
Several thousand non-Catholic students have gone through Messmer since 1984, and not a one has asked for baptism, not a one has become Catholic. This shouldn’t be considered a boast, but an indictment.
Smith says he wants students to graduate with “some values-values that any human being should have.” Not with truths, not with moral norms, but with lowest-common-denominator values, ones that “good atheists” would be comfortable with.
Messmer students may leave the school sensitive that they shouldn’t run over stray dogs, but are they sensitive at all to the vivisection of unborn children? Perhaps not, since prolife attitudes are not considered, in our society, to be “values that any human being should have.”
A few hundred miles away, in Wichita, was held the annual convention of the Kansas Catholic College Students. Two hundred young people from across the state spent a prayerful weekend listening to Bishop Eugene J. Gerber of the host diocese and to Prof. Janet E. Smith, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, singer Jerry Goebel, and Karl Keating of Catholic Answers.
These were not young people who left high school with only the values “that any human being should have.” They left as Catholics, or at least by the time they were part way through college their Catholic faith blossomed.
They praised the long hours the bishop spent with them, they loudly applauded Smith’s condemnation of contraception, they were moved by Groeschel’s call to follow Cardinal Newman in using the mind in conjunction with the spirit, and they cheered Goebel’s moving personal testimony. They even had a few nice things to say about the fourth speaker’s remarks. These young people, who impressed their elders with their reverence and good sense, are signs that things are looking up in the Church, even if some nominally Catholic schools still haven’t got a clue.
Janet Smith teaches at the University of Dallas, where she is the chairman of the board of the Millennium Evangelization Project, which, as an introductory pamphlet explains, “has developed conferences intended to help Catholics prepare for the coming millennium.”
“Too few Catholics know their faith well. The MEP seeks to educate Catholics about their faith so that they can be better Christians and can, in the face of modern challenges, evangelize others to follow Christ.”
The first phase of conferences features Christological themes. Topics addressed include population control, capital punishment, and euthanasia; Christ’s salvific plan; and natural law, virtue, and the gospel.
In 1998 the focus will be on themes relating to the Holy Spirit, followed in 1999 by themes relating to God the Father. In 2000 the emphasis will switch to Eucharistic Adoration.
Teams of speakers have been trained to present the materials to parishes, colleges, high schools, and lay groups. All talks will be based on the documents of Vatican II, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and papal encyclicals.
Among MEP’s episcopal advisors are Cardinals Adam Maida of Detroit and John O’Connor of New York, Archbishop Eusebius Beltran of Oklahoma City, and Bishops Charles V. Grahmann of Dallas and John J. Myers of Peoria.
For further information write to MEP at the University of Dallas, 1845 E. Northgate Drive, Dallas, TX 75062 or call (214) 721-4063.
The International Institute for Culture will be holding its fourth Summer Seminar on Faith and Culture in Eichstätt, Bavaria from June 16 through July 6. The seminar is open to those with at least an undergraduate degree; only twenty participants will be from the U.S.
Among the topics addressed in lectures will be the compatibility of science and religion, the Greco-Roman origins of Western thought, the medieval synthesis of faith and reason, the scholastic roots of the free market, the rise of nominalism and Protestantism, the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment, the founding of America, the rise of modern counter-faiths, Catholicism and religious tolerance, and the re-evangelization of culture.
The speakers will include Fr. Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., winner of the Templeton Prize in religion and a world-famous writer on religion and science; Josef Pieper, one of the century’s premier Catholic philosophers, and seminary professor and program director John Haas.
For further information write to the International Institute for Culture at P. O. Box 175, Wynnewood, PA 19096 or call (610) 667-3101.
We frequently receive requests from worried parents: “What should I use to keep my Catholic children Catholic?” Our response (aside from “Stuff them full with Catholic Answers’ materials): Get Michael J. Mazza’s book The Truth Will Set You Free: A Presentation of the Catholic Faith for Young Adults Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The title may be a mouthful, but the book is precisely the food needed to fill hungry young minds. Mazza is not only a good writer, but his book is entirely faithful to the teachings of the Church, and he knows how to get the good news of the Catholic faith into youthful minds and hearts.
You can order copies of The Truth Will Set You Free by contacting Veritas Press, P. O. Box 89502, Sioux Falls, SD 57105-9055.
Finally, practical advice for all of you who have been wondering how to become a lapsed Catholic quickly and easily. Fr. Hal Stockert provides these tips:
“1. Stop going to church on Sundays. This is the quickest and most effective way to become a lapsed Catholic. Begin in your teenage years. Refuse to get up for Sunday morning Mass when your parents call. Roll over. Pull the covers over your head and scream that you aren’t going and that you’ll never go again.
“2. Have an ideological fight with the Church. Pick out a ruling and find something wrong with it. Pick a fight. (Abortion and contraception are currently topical.) Study the issue thoroughly. Talk to your priest and tell him why you can no longer be a practicing Catholic ‘as a matter of conscience.’ Repeat what you’ve just told your priest to your friends at cocktail parties, to people on street corners, to your friends at the bar, to clerks at checkout counters. Insist that this is the reason you left the Church, not that you really are not too crazy about confessing your favorite sins or that you have no intention of stopping a practice that the Church teaches is sinful or that you resent the obligation to support your parish at more than the minimum level.
“3. Join another religion. Be careful not to really join another religion -you’ll just have another set of obligations to observe-but act like you have. Tell everyone you have decided that Hinduism is older and more in tune with the cosmos.
“4. Become an agnostic. This is the intellectual approach. Deduce back to the first cause, then become incredibly confused. Cease attending all church functions (except bingo, of course).
“5. Learn to dislike a priest. Remember one you loved, then compare him to the new guy, who talks too loudly/softly, is too Italian/Polish/ Irish, who never/always comes/goes to my/someone else’s house for supper/ dinner, who never/always stops to chat with people after Mass. One of the easiest reasons to hate a priest is to accuse him of always talking about money. Every pastor is wide open to this charge, and there will be nobody to contradict you.
“6. Have the Church refuse to marry you. This is perhaps the easiest way, and it gives you full justification to use number five (above) as a bonus. Pick an atheist to marry, then attend Pre-Cana conferences. Insist that you have no intention of raising your kids Catholic, but that they’re going to make up their minds ‘when they get old enough.’ Tell the priests that the only reason you want to get married in the Church is to please your mother. Storm out in a huff when they tell you you will need counseling before your wedding banns are published.
“Any of the above will provide amply opportunity to lapse as a Catholic. It is particularly effective to run one into another, leaving practically no defenses whatever against arguments to the contrary. When presented with an objection to any of these methods, switch the grounds until your listeners tire of trying to get you to commit yourself.”
Sometimes even advertisements have punchlines. Here’s an example from TV Guide. The headline: WAS JESUS MARRIED? The text: “Margaret Starbird thinks so. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar gives startling evidence that Jesus was probably married to the woman called ‘the Magdalen,’ who anointed him with the contents of her alabaster jar. Since this book was published, Catholic theologians have begun writing research papers about Jesus’ ‘Lost Bride.’ National Catholic Reporter wrote, ‘No wonder icons of Mary weep.’ The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is a volcano.”
To order, send a check to a group called Celibacy Is the Issue.
Surprise.