Category: The Catholic Difference

During the preparation of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Pope Paul VI proposed that the constitution’s discussion of papal primacy include the affirmation that the pope is “accountable to the Lord alone.”

This suggestion was rejected by the council’s Theological Commission, which wrote that “the Roman Pontiff is also bound to revelation itself, to the fundamental structure of the Church, to the sacraments, to the definitions of earlier councils, and other obligations too numerous to mention.”

Pope Paul quietly dropped his proposal.

Carolyn Gordon Tate, a major figure in the literary renaissance of the 20th century American South, once wrote Flannery O’Connor of the impact that her conversion to Catholicism had had on her writing.

As Miss O’Connor recalled in a letter, “Mrs. Tate told me that after she became a Catholic she felt she could use her eyes and accept what she saw for the first time, she didn’t have to make a new universe for each book but could take the one she found.”

Catholicism, Carolyn Gordon Tate recognized, was realism. Catholicism means seeing things as they are. Catholicism means finding within the grittiness of reality the path God is taking through history for the salvation of the world. Lent is a good time to be reminded of these truths.

In his January 11 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI continued to carve out an interesting Catholic position on ecology.

The pope insists that care for creation is a moral obligation that falls on both individuals and governments. His very invocation of “creation,” however, challenges the secular shibboleths that underwrite a lot of contemporary environmental activism.

Dan Henninger, whose Wall Street Journal column is aptly titled “Wonder Land,” put it best: “The only good news about the Fort Hood massacre is that U.S. electronic surveillance technology was able to pick up Major Hasan’s phone calls to an al Qaeda-loving imam in Yemen. The bad news is that the people and agencies listening to Hasan didn’t know what to do about it. Other than nothing.”

What’s the biggest threat to the world’s prosperity and stability over the medium haul — say, between 2020 and 2050?

The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction? A continuing economic recession? Jihadism running amok? The Detroit Lions ushering in the Apocalypse by winning an NFL championship? (Just kidding on the last . . . )