To the editor:
I’d like to add a few observations to Fr. Robert Barron’s column, “It doesn’t matter what you believe . . .” (Catholic Herald, December 4 issue). He reports that “88 percent of those surveyed said ‘how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is a Catholic.’”
However, if the respondents had been asked, “How should a Catholic live?” the answers would not have been cavalier at all.
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The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, and his heroic struggles against the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease have made him something of a secular saint.
The new bio-pic A Theory of Everything does indeed engage in a fair amount of Hawking-hagiography, but it is also, curiously, a God-haunted movie.
In an opening scene, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. “What’s cosmology?” she asks, and he responds, “Religion for intelligent atheists.”
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It is very difficult indeed to watch the documentary Bully without experiencing both an intense sadness and a feeling of helplessness.
The film opens with the heartbreaking ruminations of a father whose son committed suicide after being brutally bullied by his classmates.
We hear similar stories throughout the film, and we also watch and listen as kids are pestered, belittled, mocked, and in some cases, physically assaulted, just because they are different.
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Postmodern relativism and deconstruction have produced, at the popular level a culture dominated by the “whatever” attitude, a bland, detached indifferentism to the good and the true.
How often have you heard someone say, “that’s perhaps true for you but not for me” or “who are you to be imposing your values on me?” or in the words of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, “well, that’s just like your opinion, man.”
Is it not a commonplace today that the only moral absolute that remains is the obligation to tolerate all points of view? What this subjectivism has conduced toward is a society lacking in energy and focus, one that cannot rouse itself to corporate action on behalf of some universal good.
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A team of sociologists, led by Catholic University professor William D’Antonio, published a survey a few years ago that received quite a bit of media attention, for it showed that many Catholics disagree with core doctrines of the Church and still consider themselves “good Catholics.”
Forty percent of the respondents said that belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not essential to being a faithful Catholic. Perhaps the most startling statistic is this: 88 percent of those surveyed said “how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is a Catholic.”
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One of the classical demonstrations of God’s existence is the so-called argument from desire.
It can be stated in a very succinct manner as follows. Every innate or natural desire corresponds to some objective state of affairs that fulfills it.
We all have an innate or natural desire for ultimate fulfillment, ultimate joy, which nothing in this world can possibly satisfy. Therefore there must exist objectively a supernatural condition that grounds perfect fulfillment and happiness, which people generally refer to as “God.”
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In my capacity as theologian, teacher, and culture commentator, I’ve been reading articles on ethical matters for years and have grown relatively inured to the expression of even the most outrageous points of view.
But a few years ago, I came across a piece that was so shocking that I was compelled, as I read it, to put the magazine down several times and just shake my head in disbelief.
It was an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called “The Two Minus One Pregnancy,” dealing with the phenomenon of “reducing” (love the Orwellian language) a pregnancy from two children to one.
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Controversies surrounding the recent Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family have put me in mind of Blessed John Henry Newman, the greatest Catholic churchman of the 19th century.
Newman wrote eloquently on many topics, but the arguments around the synod compel us to look at his work regarding the evolution of doctrine.
When he was at mid-career and in the process of converting from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, Newman penned a masterpiece entitled On the Development of Christian Doctrine.
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The midterm report on the deliberations of the Synod on the Family has appeared, and there is a fair amount of hysteria all around.
John Thavis, a veteran Vatican reporter who should know better, has declared this statement “an earthquake, the big one that hit after months of smaller tremors.”
Certain commentators on the right have been wringing their hands and bewailing a deep betrayal of the Church’s teaching. One even opined that this report is the “silliest document ever issued by the Catholic Church,” and some have said that the interim document flaunts the teaching of St. John Paul II.
To the editor:
In his article in the October 16 issue, Father Barron writes that unbelieving scientists don’t seem to know what we mean by “God.” He states that a universe of contingent entities requires a non-contingent source.
Some unbelievers assert that our universe and others derived from space time fluctuations that always existed. This debate, which has been raging for several years, is partly our fault because we leave the impression that God is a solitary individual who arbitrarily created the universe from nothing.
