On PR

Recently, I've tried to give examples of how accountability works in the real world, to contrast it with the cloud-cuckoo-land that the hierarchy of clerics seems to be living in.

Today I found another example, this time relating to the CEO of BP and how his response to the oil spill has been bumbling and blundering.

Of course, as CEO, he didn't cause the oil accident personally, nor can he be blamed for technical problems that have prevented it being dealt with more quickly. And yet, the way the rhetoric is ramping up just based on some PR blunders, I wouldn't be surprised if he were removed or forced to resign soon.

By the way, Cardinal Brady is still in power, and it doesn't look like our CEO is going to resign either:

So far, that response isn't going over too well. Crisis communications experts say Hayward's communications style has become a detriment to the company, which is already facing lawsuits and is on the hook for billions of dollars in damages.

Michael Cherenson, the head of Success Communications Group of Parsippany, N.J., says Hayward is "breaking some of the basic rules of reputation management" by being arrogant and confrontational. "He is actually doing the opposite of what he should be doing," he says. "He is spending most of his time talking rather than listening. At the end of the day, a reputation is about credibility and expectations. [Hayward] is certainly not meeting the expectations of the public or being credible."

BP is also underestimating how important pictures are in telling the story. "We have not seen Mr. Hayward take off his jacket," says Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president at Levik Strategic Communications. "We have not seen him roll up his sleeves and physically help out in any way. In strategic communications, you must control the pictures."

And all this just over an oil spill! You'd think the critique over response to child molestation would be even more scrutinizing...but apparently people have just come to expect this sort of thing from the Catholic Church.

For CEOs in crisis, the playbook includes a proper appreciation of the gravity of the situation, a sense of calm urgency, and confidence-building rhetoric backed by confidence-building action. So far, Hayward is zero for three. From the outset, there's been a sense that Hayward wasn't quite prepared for this and didn't quite grasp what is at stake. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hayward "admitted that the oil giant had not the technology available to stop the leak. He also said in hindsight, it was 'probably true' that BP should have done more to prepare for such an emergency."

As the spill worsened, Hayward fretted that he and BP were its victims.reportedly told fellow executives. Of course, Hayward isn't the victim here. The sea life, the sea itself, the employees who died, the fishermen who are losing their livelihoods, the tourism industry, responsible drillers—they're the victims. Hayward should have been asking himself: What the hell did they do to deserve this? And what am I going to do to fix it? "What the hell have we done to deserve this?" he

Hmm...pretending like you're the victim when critiqued rather than, you know, the actual victims. Sound familiar?

The private grumbling has been matched by public bumbling. Hayward has used unfortunate metaphors. "We will only win this if we can win the hearts and minds of the local community," he said, apparently unaware that "hearts and minds" is a phrase forever identified with the debacle of the Vietnam War. And in a moment of exquisitely bad taste, Hayward said: "Apollo 13 did not stop the space program. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off of Brazil did not stop the aviation industry." Among the many crucial differences between Apollo 13 and this oil spill: Apollo 13 turned out to be a feel-good triumph of engineering, since the astronauts came home alive. The BP spill is simply an epic fail.

Hey, at least he didn't compare it to the holocaust!

At other times, Hayward sounds like a Monty Python character, with understatement that would be comic if it weren't so tragic. Here's how he recently explained BP's response: "It was a bit bumpy to get it going. We made a few little mistakes early on." As this Financial Times article noted, Hayward was proud of the containment effort. "Almost nothing has escaped," Hayward said. And here's the best yet, from the Guardian: "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." Yes, it's just a flesh wound!

Or "petty gossip"...

Hayward's sangfroid is impressive. Asked if he felt insecure in his position, he responded. "I don't at the moment. That of course may change." I wouldn't expect him to be storming up and down the barrier islands like Canute, trying to keep the tides away. But by any measure, this has been a monstrous cock-up. Because of its poor planning, BP is wasting resources belonging to its shareholders and to the earth, it's destroying people's livelihoods, and it's poisoning the atmosphere for the industry. Sure, you would expect any CEO worth his golden parachute to try to downplay the damage of such an incident. But listening to Hayward, you don't have much of a sense that he grips how much damage this incident and the poor response to it have inflicted on all of BP's stakeholders.

Candor

A good interview on "How to Build a Healthier Church" with Fr. Donald Cozzens, whose book Freeing Celibacy was recently recommended to me by a reader. In order to distinguish my boldings and my comments (in red) from the interviewer's questions, I've simply put his questions in blue:

In writing about priest sexual abuse, you once quoted the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, "Of necessity, the party man becomes a liar." Somehow, looking at the current crisis, this seems a particularly fitting quote. Many Catholics seem most shocked at what they perceive as an appalling lack of candor and honesty on the part of some of our leaders. Is that a fair perception?

For the most part, bishops and church officials do not see themselves as having been dishonest or as having done anything but trying to serve the best interests of the church. But many lay Catholics today, while they deeply regret the tragic harm done to apparently thousands of young people, are equally shocked and appalled at what they see as a cover-up and as dishonesty and lack of candor on the part of many of our church leaders.

I feel that the root of this problem may be a theologically naive understanding of loyalty and responsibility [indeed, in seminary and religious formation, obedience, institutional loyalty, and docility to authority seem to be equated with holiness at the expense of real virtue. And control of sexuality is all tangled up with this, as the article I recommended a few days ago said, "submission in radical abstinence required an extraordinary abandonment of the will. In theory, the abandonment was to God; in practice, it was to the 'superior,' who always thought he was."]. These men are in leadership positions because they have indeed been responsible and loyal churchmen [in other words, the criteria by which our bishops have been selected is keeping their heads down, not rocking the boat, and toeing the party-line; or as another article I recommended once pointed out, "men largely selected for a lack of initiative"]. And when the church's reputation and the sanctity of the priesthood are your top priorities, then you may end up framing scandals as mind-boggling as the abuse of minors by priests in ways that will make you speak and be heard as less than honest and candid.

...

You've talked before about this need for a more profound and frank dialogue, particularly about the state of the priesthood. Is this an opportunity now to have that kind of dialogue?

First of all, I think we priests and bishops tend to listen as hard as we can and therefore may be puzzled when people call us to listen. But, by our training and by our vocation, we tend to listen for questions so we can respond with an answer [For example, when someone questions something like mandatory celibacy, many priests' or bishops' first instinct is to "answer" the objection by trotting out the party-line defense of it]. Or we tend to listen for problems so we might respond with a solution.

I'm calling for a kind of listening that would be an honest dialogue, where the bishops themselves could be informed [in other words, to internalize and understand that there need to be some changes; not to "listen" and then immediately respond with a defensive justification of the status quo, as if the critique is an "attack" or like it is some sort of debate to be won. Can you imagine if a politician stubbornly and patronizingly tried to defend unpopular decisions to an outraged public rather than fixing things? He wouldn't be re-elected]-- and even on occasion transformed.

...

But some continue to argue "The church is not a democracy." How do you reply to that?

Involving laywomen and men in higher leadership levels in the church does not mean the church is becoming a democracy. But when I hear that charge, I could counter that in some sense there has never been a more profound democracy in the history of Western civilization than the church. I'm not talking about a political democracy, I'm talking about communal discernment of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

In the early church, leaders listened differently than they do today. And I think the early church leaders included women as well as men, ordained as well as nonordained.

We're witnessing here the dawning of the age of the laity [Lay Pride!]. The laity, I'm convinced, are going to call for greater accountability of church leaders. Bishops are as committed to the gospel as anyone, but I think it's the system in which we clerics live that has led to the spin that the official church has put on this scandal-the spin being that this is only a few bad apples who are besmirching the priesthood and the church; that we need only to find a way to identify them and get them out of the priesthood, and then all will be well.

The current crisis has renewed discussion of mandatory celibacy and the all-male priesthood. Is it fair to link those questions with the sexual abuse crisis?

I see a link between the abuse of minors and the present system of the church, which some have described as being a sick system. I'm not making a link between the all-male character of the priesthood and misconduct. I'm not making a link between sexual orientation and pedophilia, nor am I making a link between celibacy and misconduct in itself. I am suggesting that the present clerical system has allowed men, who see themselves as very faithful to the church, to make decisions that further harmed people who had already been harmed by priest abusers.

So our urgent mission this time is to free the Spirit to really work among God's people. And I think it's no longer acceptable to be told that you may not even discuss certain issues.

So you don't buy the argument that such talk is exploiting the current crisis for an agenda of church reform?

I think it's unfair to accuse people who would like to have the present system examined more honestly of having a "secret agenda." I hear this from conservatives regularly. That when people talk about systemic review and possible structural changes in the priesthood, they're simply out to foist upon the church their liberal agenda-married clergy, ordination of women, greater roles for the laity in church leadership. I think that charge is disingenuous.

Why?

Every thinking person should have a vision of where the church should be going. The only way not to have an agenda is to stop thinking and to stop imagining. [I've said before: a huge problem with the current conservative clergy, especially bishops, is that they don't seem able to articulate any concrete VISION of how they'd like the Church to be outside the status quo; and if you don't have a vision, you don't have anything to work towards] It's like saying Galileo had an agenda and therefore he had to be squashed and threatened with not only excommunication but torture and death. Is it fair to say that the preeminent theologians of the Second Vatican Council-Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and John Courtney Murray-each had a secret agenda? I don't see that.

I find it interesting that conservative visions of the church are never called "agendas." Apparently only liberals have agendas. Conservatives may want to go back to a pre-conciliar church, but no one accuses them of having an agenda; we just see that as some strange notion of orthodoxy.

One of the issues currently under scrutiny is the formation of priests. What message do seminarians receive about sexuality?

The church's approach to human sexuality sends a very mixed message. On the one hand it raises human sexuality in marriage to the dignity of a sacrament, so it has a remarkable incarnational confidence in human sexuality. At the same time it also shows an almost convulsive suspicion about human sexuality. And it has overidentified holiness with sexual abstinence.

Seeing every deliberate sexual experience outside of marital intercourse open to procreation as not only sinful but seriously sinful creates an atmosphere that leads to a guardedness on the part of seminarians and novices. They don't feel they can speak openly and candidly about their experiences of their own sexuality [which normal guys do all the time with friends, in bawdy good humor], because to speak of their experiences might be to acknowledge their own sinfulness. And the church reserves such admission to the sacrament of Reconciliation, the only place where one should make a manifestation of conscience. [I've often thought that, though private anonymous "sealed" confession should always remain an option, Catholics should get used to discussing their sinfulness candidly, publicly, without this whole facade that is put up (sometimes in the name of "avoiding scandal") wherein, when we're around Catholics qua Catholics (as opposed to around our "real friends")...we need to all pretend to be little goody two-shoes even though this is inauthentic. Especially when it comes to embarrassment and shame surrounding sexuality.]

I would hope for a renewed theology of human sexuality. But many theologians and bishops are afraid to go there. [Though I like recent attempts (ala Theology of the Body) to present the teachings in a less legalistic, more personalist way...I would argue that, rather than changing any objective teachings, we simply need a more realistic pastoral approach towards morality in general when it comes to their subjective application. One more like the Orthodox concept of oikonomeia, based on being pragmatic about human frailty and incremental improvement rather than the uncompromising emphasis on immediate idealism and utopian perfectionism]

...

Could the priesthood appear inviting to abusers?

The priesthood appeals, I hope, to the best and brightest, the people who are really mature, committed, and want to further the gospel. It certainly does that. But the priesthood can also appeal to people who don't have a good sense of their own identity, who are conflicted about their sexuality, and who need the mantle of the priest persona to allow them to feel like they're somebody.

Recently I've heard bishops say, "What I'm looking for in a priest candidate is a man who would make a wonderful husband and father." [A good standard! However, it would seem obvious to me that there is no better way to find this out than if he is, in fact, already a good husband and father...] And I'm arguing that the priests need to have the ability to connect well with other human beings.

You have written that, in contrast to the typical pedophile in the larger population [who most often target girls], some 90 percent of priest abusers have been men who target teenage boys. In the wake of the current crisis, a Vatican official and some conservatives in the United States have picked up on that observation and are calling for a ban on all homosexually oriented priests. Is that part of the solution for the priest sexual abuse crisis?

In my judgment, absolutely not. It's unfair to the many, many committed, effective, talented, celibate, and chaste gay priests who serve the church today with distinction [the last thing we need in the world today is more stigma]. To suggest that gay men should not be priests is mind-boggling to me. The church has been served well by gay and straight priests throughout its history. We've had gay individuals who are saints. We've had outstanding gay bishops.

For example?

I'll mention Gerard Manley Hopkins. There has been speculation about some highly revered saints and church leaders that I don't think I should name. But one current outstanding example is Franciscan Father Mychal Judge, the brave gay priest who gave his life ministering to firefighters on September 11.

Is the idea of a ban of gay priests even a realistic option?

It's not. If the church said, "We're not going to accept gay men into the seminary," in addition to it being biased, it can't be implemented. There is no perfect screening process, and if we tried, we'd be creating an atmosphere of subterfuge [and secrecy and paranoia and repression in general. And, if the military's experience is any guide, of opportunities for blackmail. We don't need a McCarthyism in the seminaries...]. If a candidate suspected that he was gay and felt a call from God to become a priest, he would be tempted to hide his orientation while going through the admissions procedure and psychological testing.

In addition, we would see our already critical seminary situation worsen. If the church tried to drive gay priests from the priesthood, it would significantly weaken our ranks. And if we wanted to be consistent, then we'd also have to ask the gay bishops to leave.

So if we shouldn't ban gay priests, should the church do anything about the gay subculture that apparently exists in some circles of the priesthood?

This is a very sensitive issue. Just as there are straight priests who do not take celibacy and chastity seriously, so there are also some gay priests who do not take celibacy and chastity seriously. When we find examples of gay priests who seem to almost make a mockery of even an attempt to be celibate, we run the risk of coloring with the same brush gay priests in general.

So, are there straight priests who have used the priesthood as a shelter for their sexual activity? Yes. Are there gay priests who have used the priesthood as a shelter or screen for a life that is incompatible with chastity and celibacy? Yes. Do more gay priests seem to have a cavalier approach to celibacy than straight priests? I don't know. Some think that there is evidence to support that, but we just don't know.

People talk about this crisis as a historical moment, some even going so far as to compare it to the 16th-century Reformation. This may be overreaching, but can this become the beginning of a purification and renewal for the Catholic Church? And if so, what could you envision as the positive outcomes?

I will leave to historians whether this current crisis is comparable to the crisis we experienced in the 16th century. But it is profoundly significant by anyone's measure today. I believe the Spirit is with us in this crisis and we will find a healthier church as we slowly grieve and heal and move through the present dark night.

I think the priesthood will be purified. I hope the bishops will gain a new openness to the pastoral experience of their priests and the lived experience of their people. And I believe that the laity will speak more candidly to their pastors, the pastors will speak more candidly to their bishops, and the bishops will speak more candidly to the bishop of Rome and to the curia.

More Acadecadence

As if catering directly to my anti-academic sentiments, I found a great article critiquing the uselessness of humanities "academia" and research specialization therein:

We have become so obsessed with specialization, so entranced by advanced degrees and who wrote what when, that we [I guess by "we" he means the mutual admiration society which is the intellectual elite; I certainly don't feel this way] feel that the only way that someone has anything worth saying is if they have jumped through the appropriate academic hoops.

...

the technocracy at the heart of the humanities, the pressure to produce papers that essentially say nothing, the ultimate subservience to the utilitarian interests of society, and so forth. Studying the treasures of human wisdom cannot mimic the specialization that astronomer, engineers, and medical doctors are expected to have, and doing so can only distort the subject that one seeks to study.

...

On the one hand, I share the sentiments of my hard sciences doctorate-holding wife who thinks that the humanities at the university are a total waste of time. Really, what are you paying for, and could those resources be better deployed? But more importantly, the question has to be asked concerning what benefit does it serve human wisdom to have a cadre of specialists who are under pressure to produce written material and live off of the profits gained from it? Socrates wrote nothing, and had to live a life just like everyone else. St. Paul was the greatest theologian ever, and he was a tent maker. Even the great lights of the Church were either pastors of souls, preachers, or lived in monasteries where they no doubt had other duties. None of these people were by any means professionals in our sense of the word.

...

Yes, you don’t have the time or the resources to study what you want. Yes, you don’t have the benefit of publications (which nobody reads) or peer-review (from peers you barely respect). But I do it all because I have questions that I want answered. I just don’t see the contemporary academic world as the holder of all of these secrets.

I almost wish there were a revolution going on so we could all go out and hang some of these professional nerds. They've ruined University, ruined the Church, ruin everything they touch. I've said before: far from requiring bishops to hold doctorates, we shouldn't let anyone with a doctorate anywhere near the episcopacy. Theologians have not made good leaders in the Church.

Training

A good point:

When David Kaczynski realized that his brother Ted was the Unabomber, he made the hard choice and called the FBI. Thanks to David's moral courage, the man responsible for murdering and maiming dozens of people with homemade bombs sent through the mail was stopped before he could carry out his grander schemes of putting bombs on airliners and detonating them over cities. When Kaczynski received a million-dollar reward from the FBI, he donated most of the money to his brother's victims.

Kaczynski had no special moral training to prepare him to turn in his brother or make other wrenching decisions. Until then, his life's work had been helping his father run a foam rubber business. It is therefore instructive to contrast his actions with those of the Pope, a man supposedly chosen by God to lead the world in the path of righteousness, and of his ring of cardinals and bishops.

And yet they're always extolling the virtues of seminary training and the utter necessity of "human formation" (read: brainwashing) for future priests.

And yet...I know plenty of decent, good people who never underwent any special training. And I know plenty of priests who don't seem all that particularly more holy than anyone else. And if it were so necessary for holiness to go through such a process, they'd make all Catholics do it, or else it would imply a holier-than-thou attitude about clergy.

Methinks the resocialization they put seminarians through is designed to make them pliable and institutionalize them into the clerical system, but has proven itself worthless when it comes to forming any sort of "holiness" or actual virtue. "Discipline," maybe, but not for good. I think we're seeing the fruits of that whole rotten system now. You can't train people to be good.

I think that's the point of the David Kaczynski example: the "moral" training and discipline of "human formation" all these clerics went through, allegedly to make them holy or better people...didn't succeed in that at all. Nor do I think it was ever really intended to. What it did succeed at accomplishing is what it was designed to accomplish: to make these men loyal to the institutional Church above all else, to inculturate them into a clericalist power structure, to make them good little bureaucrats.

And when that is all elevated with the term "holy obedience" and obedience is thus equated with holiness...well, it's no wonder we are in this mess. The "military" model of training through "discipline" is great if you want to create drones who are willing to kill and die without asking questions as cogs in an efficient machine. But to create actually moral, virtuous individuals...such tactics of reprogramming are simply useless.

But in some ways I fear it's all about appearances, as the poster I once quoted way back at the beginning of this blog said, in a description I am finding more and more relevant, "Everyone wants to see rows of clean cut asexual kids, learning their Greek verbs and saying the rosary during Holy Hour, then coming to have cups of tea with Nanna and playing games with the kiddies (though not too enthusiastically). This is a recipe for a clergy with no self-knowledge and little of anything else."

Scientology, or...?

In an interview with Playboy magazine, Hubbard's estranged son Ronald DeWolf asserted that Auditing focused on sex and the individual's sex life, and could later be used as a form of control: "Auditing would address a guy's entire sex life. It was an incredible preoccupation...You have complete control over someone if you have every detail of his sex life and fantasy life on record. In Scientology the focus is on sex. Sex, sex, sex. The first thing we wanted to know about someone we were auditing was his sexual deviations. All you've got to do is find a person's kinks, whatever they might be. Their dreams and fantasies. Then you can fit a ring through their noses and take them anywhere. You promise to fulfill their fantasies or you threaten to expose them ... very simple."

A Book to Read?

Has anyone read this? It looks interesting to say the least, I should get it:

The Politics Of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense Of Political Liberalism

The Politics of Human Frailty addresses the fraught and topical issue of the relationship between political liberalism and theology. Political liberalism is frequently denounced by theologians as individualist, relativist, and hubristic. In response, there has been a tendency in recent political theology to attempt the overcoming of political liberalism, with the hope of building a more ecclesiastical, virtuous, or community-oriented space. In an original and well-documented argument, Insole demonstrates that this negative characterisation of political liberalism is inadequate, both conceptually and historically.

By attending to thinkers such as Richard Hooker, Edmund Burke, Lord Acton, and John Rawls, Insole shows that a passion to protect the individual within liberal institutions can arise not from an illusory sense of self-sufficiency, but from an insight into our fallen condition, characterised by frailty, sin, and complexity. This strand of political liberalism arises from a sense of our solidarity in sin with others, and the hubris of judging our fellow citizens, when judgment belongs to God alone. Such a position would be at odds with theologically over-zealous appropriations of the theme of "liberty."

Insole concludes his book by showing that the proposed alternatives to political liberalism—such as can be found in the influential Radical Orthodoxy movement—are naïve, utopian, and dangerous, and in certain respects theologically impoverished.

Another Common Misunderstanding

I'm going to be writing two "Common Misunderstanding" articles on the Eucharist. Later this week, hopefully, I will write one discussing why I think emphasizing "Eucharistic Miracles" like Lanciano can be confusing theologically and, frankly, repulsive to people, at least in a contemporary setting. Today, however, I'm going to be discussing the notion of "accidents" as it relates to the Real Presence.

In both cases, I would first like to highly recommend this article from the Real Presence Association which I think does a pretty good job at explaining what Catholics really believe about the Eucharist, in contrast to many common misunderstandings and faulty, even grotesque, imaginings of the doctrine, which have probably played a large part in people rejecting it.

Informed Catholics know that, in the Aristotelian language that was adopted in solemnly defining the doctrine of the Real Presence, the "substance" is said to change while the "accidents" remain.

However, Catholics often seem to be under the mistaken impression that the concept of "accident" is related intrinsically to our sense-knowledge. Even priests, though perhaps they are just speaking sloppily, tend to describe accidents as if they were equivalent to sensory phenomena, as if the accidents that remain after transubstantiation (to use, for convenience's sake, the Aristotelian-based terminology popular in the West) are just some sort of sensory illusion.

"Oh, the shape and the color you see, and the flavor you taste, and the texture and mass you feel remain by a miracle of God." While this may all be true, it is an incomplete description; it gives the impression that the accidents are merely the sense-impressions of an object, and that the action of the miracle in transubstantiation is largely an action on our own consciousness, that God is deceiving our senses directly with some sort of illusion.

This, however, is not correct. As Catholic Encyclopedia says:

Theorists who, like the Cartesians, deny the objective, distinct entity of all accidents have been obliged to reconcile this negation with their belief in the Real Presence by maintaining that the species, or accidents, of bread and wine do not really remain in the Eucharist, but that after Consecration God produces on our senses the impressions corresponding to the natural phenomena. This theory obviously demands a seemingly unnecessary multiplication of miracles and has at present few if any serious advocates.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01096c.htm

The unwieldy "multiplication of miracles" required by such a theory can be realized if one starts to imagine the consequences of an "illusion" theory of accidents. For example, if the weight of the the host is only a sensory illusion, then we are in fact lifting the weight of an adult human being in our hand; so God must also be giving us super physical strength, without our knowing. Furthermore, if the size of the host is only a sensory illusion to our sight, then Jesus cannot, in fact, fit in the tabernacle. It must have burst open, and so the continuation of it in its unbroken form must be another illusion. The fact that we can move our hand around the host, when really Christ is much bigger, would have to be another illusion, or else Christ would have to be made non-solid. If we took a picture of the host with a camera (which is not a conscious being) then either God would have to intervene in the film to make sure it didn't record what was really there, or else every time we looked at the photograph, God would have to again deceive our sense of sight. As you can see, a "multiplication of miracles" makes such a theory inelegant and clunky.

In reality, this is not how it works, as the Real Presence article I mentioned above helps to explain:

Another question noted earlier asked whether the accidents are hiding the substance from our gaze, so that their removal would be like drawing back a curtain, allowing us to see Jesus' body. If one is tempted to say yes, a moment's reflection should show that the right answer must be no. A substance can't be seen or tasted or experienced by any of the senses. To think otherwise would reduce substances to the status of accidents, thus making it impossible to see what the dogma of transubstantiation means, and inevitably leading one into bewilderment when trying to explore the teaching.

It is not that Christ is present as He was to the Apostles and that merely some illusion in our senses prevents us from experiencing this. He is actually present in a different manner that, though just as real, is not quite as full. Namely, when He was present on earth 2000 years ago, His accidents were extended, whereas in the Eucharist, though His accidents are still present (inasmuch as they inhere in His substance, which is present), they are unextended; they are present only in the manner of substance, as the same article explains:

But the mode of their existence is conditioned by the fact that Jesus becomes present through transubstantiation. Substance is converted into substance, and the accidents, consequently, are there in the manner of substance.

It is not as if the sensible Jesus is present under some sort of veil or mask and if we removed it, we could see Him exactly like the Apostles did when He was on earth as His own proper accident-extended place 2000 years ago. Rather, He is present only by the association of His substance with the accidents of bread and wine which include the location of the church or wherever. The accident of place which properly inheres in His own substance, however, remains Heaven. His ability to be present in multiple places in the Eucharist comes only from His non-inherent association with numerous sets of accidents that include different locations.

What, then, are accidental properties if not the sense experiences of things? Well, they do include the sense experiences of things, but are not limited to that. In fact, accidents are any relative property of something, whereas substance is the thing objectively and absolutely in itself.

An image that helped me involves a Universe in which only one particle exists. Would this particle have size or mass? Well, in a potential, unextended way, sort of. But without anything else to compare it to...not really. It's hard to say something is a micrometer long without a ruler or some standard against which to compare it. Would it have place? Again, position in space is defined only relative to other objects (ie, there is no absolute Cartesian coordinate system in the universe independent of existing objects). Would it have color in a meaningful sense if there were no photons to bounce off it and no eyes to see those? Would it have age? Not if time is defined in terms of change/motion, as one non-composite particle would not change, and motion is only measured as a change in position relative to other objects. Could it even be said to be the object or subject of any action? Evidently not, as there is no other object to act on it, and it has no other object to act on.

And yet, would we deny the existence of this particle in itself even though it could have no effects or comparison relative to other objects? Would we deny the existence of a potential to relate with other objects in a certain way if it came into contact with them (for example, if there was light, it would affect it in such a way that it would bounce off at a certain wave-length).

Some philosophers would indeed deny the existence of the thing in-itself. The universe, in their minds, is just a collection of relative properties that are only all defined in terms of each other. To them, there is no absolute being in which properties inhere. For some, they are merely phenomena in our consciousness. Or relation is all that exists, one particle could not exist on its own because it needs to be defined in terms of another. What we perceive of as "things" are just bundles of properties, though what causes the "bundling" is a point of contention.

It would actually still be possible to "parse" transubstantiation in some of these philosophical frameworks, but that is not what Catholics are familiar with and recent attempts to do so (ie, "transignification," etc) have been met with suspicion (though I think they can be understood in an orthodox sense, and that this was the sense intended).

Nevertheless, as we can see, accidents are not just properties relative to the senses, but relative to any other external object. Hence, it is not merely a sensory illusion that the host doesn't weigh as much as a whole man, or that it fits in a tabernacle, or that a camera records a piece of bread rather than Jesus, as size and weight and shape and color are accidents even relative to inanimate, non-sensing objects. The fact that it fits in the tabernacle, the relative size, is independent of our senses.

And, even, when it comes to the question of the internal constituent parts relative to each other. Christ, in Himself, remains with His constituent parts arranged correctly situated relative to each other. But under the accidents of the host it is not as if Christ's head corresponds to the top part of the host, his arms to the sides, his legs to the bottom, his trunk to the center, etc. Rather, the entire Christ is related to the the entire host in each part. Which is to say, each particle of the host (even without being broken) and each drop in the chalice is related to the whole Christ in no particular physical orientation, in each of His parts. It is a conversion of whole substance to whole substance, not of specific individual parts to equivalent individual parts.

So when it comes to this misconception about accidents, it is sort of like the question, "If a tree fell in the woods and there was no one around, does it make a sound?" The fact is that accidents are not dependent on our senses or on conscious observers. The locus of the perdurance of the accidents is not our sense knowledge. If a host is sitting on the altar and no one is there...a photon that hits it is going to bounce off at the wavelength of the color of the host, whether there is an eye or conscious observer there to receive that photon or not.

For the accidents are taught to remain inhering in no subject. The relative effects of bread and wine no longer arise from bread and wine in themselves, but are miraculous sustained by God directly, through the instrumentality of either the body or blood of Christ. Aquinas proposes that the accident of quantity is what is directly sustained, and that the other accidents are sustained in that. The accidents sustained do not inhere in Christ however, which is to say, they do not become the proper natural accidents of Christ's own substance; He does not metamorphosize or transfigure or "shape-shift" into bread and wine in His own physical form.

This sustaining of the accidents from collapse is actually the link or association the accidents have with Christ by which He can be said to be "under" them even though they do not inhere in Him (not being His own proper accidents). Namely, that by a miracle of God, His body is made the cause of the accidents of bread not collapsing, and His blood is made the cause of the accidents of wine not collapsing.

In fact, it is this relationship by which the substance of the bread can be said to "become" the substance of the body and the substance of the wine can be said to "become" the substance of the wine. The word "become" (and the word "transubstantiation") implies a continuity. Yet, in reality, we know what is happening is not like the same piece of clay being molded into a different shape (ie, a continuity of matter) but rather we are told God annihilates the substance of bread and wine entirely. What continuity then exists? Why is this said to be one substance "becoming" another, rather than being merely switched or replaced with another? Catholic Encyclopedia explains in its very enlightening article on the Real Presence, "If the act of conversion is not to become a mere process of substitution, as in sleight-of-hand performances, the terminus ad quem must unquestionably in some manner newly exist, just as the terminus a quo must in some manner really cease to exist. Yet as the disappearance of the latter is not attributable to annihilation properly so called, so there is no need of postulating creation, strictly so called, to explain the former's coming into existence." The answer it gives is simply that:

we have the two extremes of conversion, namely, bread and wine as the terminus a quo, and the Body and Blood of Christ as the terminus ad quem. Furthermore, the intimate connection between the cessation of one extreme and the appearance of the other seems to be preserved by the fact, that both events are the results, not of two independent processes, as, e.g. annihilation and creation, but of one single act, since, according to the purpose of the Almighty, the substance of the bread and wine departs in order to make room for the Body and Blood of Christ. Lastly, we have the commune tertium in the unchanged appearances of bread and wine, under which appearances the pre-existent Christ assumes a new, sacramental mode of being, and without which His Body and Blood could not be partaken of by men.

In other words, it is exactly because the body and blood are made the instrumental cause sustaining the enduring accidents from collapse that the substance of bread and wine are annihilated or at least pass out from the realm of a reality that can affect anything external to itself. The continuity of the accidents is thus the continuity (the "commune tertium") by which the "terminus a quo" (the substance bread and wine) can be said to "become" the "terminus ad quem" (the body and blood of Christ) even though the former cease to exist.

Of course, the entire Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, the entire Person (now risen and glorified) Jesus Christ is present by "concomitance" under both species. But it must be understood too that the bread becomes directly the body of Christ, and that the other things are only "along for the ride," as it were, inasmuch as they are inseparable from the body. Likewise, the wine becomes directly only the blood of Christ, and the body, soul, and divinity only "tag along" because they are inseparably one substance of Christ. Aquinas says, however, that on Good Friday, when the body, blood, and soul of Christ really were separated, if the Apostles had consecrated the Eucharist, the bread would have become only body and divinity, the wine only blood and divinity, and the soul (also still hypostatically united to the divinity) would have not been present, as He was sojourning in the afterlife.

This insistence that "by force of words" the bread only directly becomes the body, and the wine only directly becomes the blood (though the entire Christ is present by concomitance) is an important distinction to remember when it comes to the Sacrifice of the Mass and the need for a double consecration. Though the entire Christ is present when either species is consecrated (and thus the reception of Communion only requires one species), it is not the Sacrifice until there has been the double consecration because it is only in presenting the body and blood separately in an absolute way that the original Sacrifice of Calvary is recalled and thus re-presented. The only difference is that on Calvary the body and blood were actually materially separated, whereas in the Mass they are separately presented in an unbloody sacramental manner (through the separate consecration of bread directly into body, and wine directly into blood) even though, by the concomitance of Christ's substance, they do not actually separate any longer. Yet by the separate consecrations there is at least a real tendency towards such a separation (though concomitance prevents it from happening), as can be seen in the Good Friday example.

Hopefully, for those inclined to abstract thinking, this will clear up some common misconceptions about the Real Presence that lead to sloppy speech sometimes.

Real Accountability

Secular organizations seem to get it. The other day I discussed Gordon Brown's resignation because Labour lost the elections in Britain.

That's just how things have to work if you want to succeed: if someone isn't getting the job done, you replace them until you find someone who makes it work, who is right for the situation, who has the talent and skills needed to get it done. That's what you have to do if you are in competition or accountable to stake-holders.

Now I find out that apparently one failing school district decided to fire all their teachers in order to start with a new slate and fix things! The teachers had to re-apply to get their jobs back, and only half would be re-hired.

They're all getting their jobs back after much negotiation now, for better or worse...but the fact that this would even occur to the district (and that even the President of the United States expressed support for the mass firing) shows how accountability and efficiency has to work!

Yet, I get the sad sense that no failing dioceses are ever going to even consider firing all their priests and putting out a call for a whole new slate of volunteers while only re-hiring half of the old. Nor is the Vatican going to remove vast swaths of bishops even though the barque is letting on water at an alarming rate...

Part of the problem, of course, is the shortage due to mandatory celibacy and the full-time model of the current priesthood. You can only be efficient with workers when there is a whole pool of willing candidates you can threaten to replace them with. And yet, without something like this, I see no real incentive for anything but mediocre performance in the clergy.

The Other Secularism

There is a very interesting post on CathBlog about how Jesus was not the big "pro-family" booster that later Christian "family values" rhetoric (which seems to have reached a fever pitch recently) would paint Him as.

The article emphasizes how it was not the family, but rather the Kingdom of God, which was central to Christ's message, and that this requires a radical individual response that often may contradict family ties:

This inconvenient truth is that the Gospels do not hold the family up as central to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus did not proclaim the family, nor did he exhort marriage as the means to discipleship. Matthew 10:34-39 expresses a Jesus as figure of dissension in the family, a bringer of a sword to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and that whoever loves their child or their parent more than they love Jesus is not worthy of him. Familial obligations are dissolved by the demands of discipleship. This is shown clearly in Luke 9:59-62 in which death obligations, last minute farewells, and related familial ties are dismissed. The Gospels are peppered with similar demands of discipleship, and of the relinquishing of those mundane ties which in fact are obstacles to both the acceptance and embrace of Jesus. More importantly though, the clinging onto a range of mundane ties; those of comfort, those of wealth, those of structural, moral, societal, and familial bonds, all of the myriad norms and means by which we in fact declare our self sufficiency from God, are what cripple our turning towards the one thing key to the life of Jesus of Nazareth: the acceptance of the Kingdom of God.

It is another inconvenient truth that so much of the apocalyptic imperative of the Good News was jettisoned very early from the life and tradition of the Church. Christianity came to be, on the one hand, within a Hellenistic culture which celebrated reason, equilibrium, society, and family; alternatively, that of the Roman Empire, an empire that valued order and familial obligation above all else. The worlds of mind and of order were those to which Paul and the subsequent Church Fathers conformed the Good News, to show that Christians were good and reliable citizens of empire, and that Christianity was the product of reasonable revelation.

...

Ironically, the Church had become well and truly secularised, so profoundly so that cultural norms of empire, those of citizenship, stability, honour, familial obligation and ties, became the ethos of Church, and the motifs by which morality and religiosity were infused. How odd it is that many of today's proponents of 'orthodoxy', and the inveighers against 'relativism', are perhaps the unwitting spruikers for what is actually the victory of a secularism that long ago permeated our Church.

In our brave new world of familial morality and spirituality, the Kingdom of God is but a distant memory, too rude and overwhelming to ever really have expected to retain the central place within a Church one time hungry for acceptance and struggling to survive. Such a sacrifice has been the price of success. But now at a time when the Church is buffeted by new forces of perceived opposition and threat, how certain can it be that past icons of surety and respectability can achieve success? Old and trusted icons are peddled out to meet very new and misunderstood challenges.

The comments section, as is often the case, is even more interesting, however. As it contrasts the knee-jerk reactions of many of the "conservative" readers, with the nuanced and level-headed point Mark Johnson was trying to make. Some of the more interesting ones:

Family is always transient. It is of value for some time, but it is, without other fundament, nothing but feeding bellies and living on seductive instincts. Family stands only at the beginning of the news Jesus had to tell. What is the origin of famine and war? It's the notion of giving importance to my own life (my genes) more than to others.

And:

What I think the article simply proposes (using my paraphrases) is that the focus and rhetoric on family ties and nurturing that features large in much theological and pastoral Christian-speak is not especially Christian, but rather common to diverse, natural, even pagan, values. What the article then asks us to consider, in my view, is that Jesus' kingdom of heaven message was really much more counter-cultural and deeply radical in its call for an individual response. I don't think the article is saying we should cease the positive nourishment of either nuclear or extended family; rather just to recognise its less central place in the scheme of Jesus' mission.

And:

Though Christian discourse focusing on family may articulate ideals and reflect instinctive aspirations, such discourse may also be seen as supportive of an ethos which depends on and preserves all sorts of status quo which might be intolerable or oppressive. A society and morality based on family considerations for example might be seen to contribute directly to greed, enmity and structural inequity. (This is why some religious people turn to communalist models). In the Gospels Jesus on several occasions says things which suggest familial obligations – at least purely formal or sentimental ones - are subordinate to or even irrelevant to discipleship. We can call to mind surely situations where people have had to follow their conscience rather than show loyalty to family. I'll conclude by asking, does common Christian discourse on family facilitate that?

And:

For reasons that I will pursue later, 'family' has become a vehicle for a very particular moral code, and has been so co-opted deliberately and cynically, relegating 'family' as Christian vocation to a secondary issue. But I'll write more on that later. I wonder though if we should nuance the issue even further? The need for this is to avoid the very problem we have just discussed. 'Family' as moral vehicle has become synonymous with the lay state, that lay people only have presence within the Church insofar as they are married, insofar as they are 'family', insofar as they too are reconstructed as the moral code utilising 'family'. Instead lay people, who as part of families, should be present within/as Church simply as those too responding to the Kingdom of God. Lay people are not just 'family' people. We are all the People of God, all asked for the metanoia demanded by the Kingdom. Not just 'family', not just lay, not just cleric or religious. Such prioritisations may serve particular ideologies, but are far from that Kingdom which upturns strict religious demarcations and exclusions, exposes the fraudulence of those who are held up as the paragons of accepted religiosity (they have had their reward), in which the first will be last, and reveals that it is God alone that knows what is within our hearts.

And:

And I do need to ask you again (as you in fact have not answered elsewhere): was Jesus of Nazareth an Aristotelian? A Thomist? Did he preach the 'natural law'? Did he embrace the varieties of Hellenistic thought that you adhere to? If not, what instead did he proclaim? If he did, or if he is in conformity with these pagan systems then please show how?...There's no need to be so self-critical with your stance defending Jesus' adherence to the 'natural Law'. I do understand where you are coming from. But in regards to your further claims, you will need to show me how Jesus confirmed the 'natural Law', I actually wasnt aware that he was savvy with such Hellenistic inspired thinking. Who knew that Jesus the Aramiac speaking Jew was actually proclaiming Hellenistic categories and not the Kingdom of God? Who knew that he suffered died and was buried all for Hellenism?

And best of all, these two:

All that you say of Jesus is derived from nothing more than the long heritage of Greek thought. The Logos (and its later understanding as Word), as you must surely well know, has a heritage beginning (at the very least) with Heraclitus. The early Church Apologists utilised the predominant paradigm so to convey an understanding of Christ which could resonate in many ways with what was already culturally and intellectually familiar and, most importantly, intellectually respectable. Do we still need to speak in such categories? And in fact has not the Gospel been radically transformed by such a syncretistic accommodation? Far from being 'Protestant' (whatever you mean by that) are we Catholics to mindlessly adhere to past paradigms as if they are to be worshipped? To worship the mere paradigmatic means as if end? Frankly, you fail to understand what Tradition is if you so needfully cling to past rigid paradigms. You make a serious error in confusing the means of proclamation with that to be proclaimed. Rather we need now ask why, and what interests are served by, such clinging? Why not look at the very paradigms with which Jesus of Nazareth utilsed to proclaim the Kingdom? Why is Logos theology preferable to Apocalyptic? Taste? unquestioning adherence to comforting and historically burdened forms? More neat and ordered? Does the God of Jesus of Nazareth prove to be too unwieldly to worship? If so elusive then the God of Greek philosophical ontology (or of a particular ontology), the God of the meta-system (and God as meta-system) is more readily definable. Rather than what has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the question actually is: does Galilee still need Athens and Rome?

And:

What a touchy point this is with so many! Try to suggest - around Mother's Day - that much religious rhetoric about 'family' encourages the perpetuation of thinking along grooves that, from pre-Christian times, emphasise or aimed at property accumulation, tribal competitiveness and division, and that instead, actually, Jesus' kingdom of heaven sought to overturn or rise above such barriers to universal love, peace and virtue, through individual conversion, and immediately almost everyone rushes to either protect their Saturday Evening Post suburban family icon, or protect the hierarchical structure of the Church! It does explain though why politicians always endeavour to use code words like 'family' (and 'children' etc) when introducing policies that either have nothing to do with it or will hurt the most vulnerable. This is surely the point: family is not the bedrock of the kingdom as Jesus preached it, nor is any particular church model. Blood/social family relations are, in the scheme of things, not intrinsically morally good relations - indeed they may in many cases be the vehicle for abuse and oppression, equally as the vehicle for nurture and affirmation. If the kingdom of heaven can exist here on earth, it is constituted by each person starting the beatitudes and parables within his or her own heart. Surely the challenge the article poses for us is to realise that undue theological attachment to either family or church model(s) is to mistake means for the end and to indeed worship false idols.

This was interesting too:

The Jewish people understood themselves as 'chosen,' were the Covenant people, and heirs to the promises of Yahweh to Abraham insofar as the they were realised in history, and generationally so, hence the requirement to be 'fruitful', for the promises and fidelity of Yahweh are realised in a generational relationship. The coming of the Kingdom of God changes this relationship. The 'lineal' relationship of 'salvation history' becomes vertical with the direct eruption of God into history. This is why Jesus of Nazareth could not possibly have held 'family' as central because the underlying reason for 'family' in the schema of 'salvation history' is utterly contradicted by the eruption of the Kingdom of God into history. God is present amongst his people, in the now and not yet fulfilment of history, upturning all of the calcified legalites and definitions that have held people in slavery. Any Christian who holds 'family' as somehow central to being a Christian, let alone central to Jesus of Nazareth, simply does not understand the ground of their own faith, and certainly has no understanding of the significance of Jesus of Nazareth's revelation of the Kingdom. One can only question what really is the motivation of those who hold 'family' as somehow intimately expressive of God, and of salvation. Sure, it has social significance, but is meanigless for salvation, and irrelevent to Jesus of Nazareth.

Though calling Jesus "anti-family" may be a hyperbole (something Jesus Himself certainly used)...the more interesting point is about how Christ did not teach any of the Greco-Roman philosophy or civic values that later came as accretions to the Christian message. Not that they're wrong, in context, but that they aren't of the essence and that they were mainly to make Christianity palatable to the Hellenistic world. He finds it odd, then, and I mainly agree...that Christians living in postmodern America, cling to these categories that were specific to a certain time and place.

The family comes back into this not that it was a bad thing, but that it was certainly not central to Christ's message of conversion in the same way it was central to Mediterranean society (and all secular societies throughout history, based ultimately only on a Darwinian materialism). Emphasizing "family values" was actually, in transitioning Christianity, a form of secularization, of appeasing the world by emphasizing the things it prioritized: the building blocks of imperial social stability, even when they could often be the tools of oppression or maintaining the socio-political status quo, as invariably the family (and, by extension, social class) has been throughout history (patria potestas anyone?)

I personally am inclined, actually, to sympathize with a sort of social trinitarianism (which Arturo Vasquez seems to dismiss in his blog post discussing the same article), but certainly I'd agree to identify Christ's message or the Kingdom of God with the "iconization of the family"...is as faulty as the conservative alliance many seem to make between Christianity and nationalism, "patriotism," democracy, monarchism, capitalism, or numerous other social institutions throughout history. Conservative in the very real sense of serving only to reinforce (ie, conserve) the current social or political status quo.

The family certainly has a place in the Christian dispensation, in fact God Himself is portrayed as Father, and both parental and marital imagery are used by Jesus, who lived in His own Holy Family. But at the same time, Christianity is radically subversive of The World; "family values" (too often just a codeword for mere bourgeois respectability) is certainly not the central feature of Christ's proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and those who portray it that way have a very specific, and ironically very secular (ie, focused on the socio-political structure of this World), "conservative" agenda that does nothing for those outside such structures of worldly respectability. If Christ had a message of "family," it is that we are all the children of God our "abba," it is that a new family was being forged based not on blood but on spirit.

(And that worldly respect, I will add as an afterthought, is one of the main things conservative celibate priests seem to be afraid they'll lose if married priests are allowed; as then their celibacy will no longer be "explained" by respectable institutional requirement. Then, to the World and its perverse logic, they will be outside the bounds of those institutionalized "family values," like unmarried women in the past who did not enter nunneries or the Vestal Virgins, etc; suspect of subversiveness of the established Order, as really all Christians should be).

Infinitely Worse

A great rebuke of the "black cloud of flattery" that seems to have enveloped the Catholic blogosphere:

Story after story of not simply abusive priests, but of mendacious bishops, intransigent superiors of religious orders, and venal curial officials, seem to pour out daily. Of course, the velocity of these reports is the result of the media’s knowing a good story when they see one, perhaps even some lingering anti-Catholicism. On the other hand, they’re not making this stuff up.

And here is what concerns me now. Despite the fact that Scout masters, school teachers, youth minister and the like--not to mention ministers, rabbis and imams--have all been connected with sexual abuse, the institutions of which they are members simply have not demonstrated (so far) the obtuseness, stonewalling, defensiveness, instransigence and sinfulness that the Catholic church has on this matter. The institution of the church--and here I mean the hierarchy--particularly in its historic desire to shield itself from any and all critique by "outsiders," and its desire to avoid "scandal" made the problem of sexual abuse, which is probably just as rampant in other groups, infinitely worse.

How did we get to this point? How did we find ourselves with some leaders who are not only blind but almost willfully so? (The old term "invincible ignorance" comes to mind.) Part of it is the lust for power. Our blunt editorial this week talks about the "black cloud of flattery" that envelopes the curia, the last Renaissance court. Part of it is pride. One of the less-noted aspects of this saga is how shocked Vatican officials are when anyone has the temerity to contradict them, or even to question them. (Benedict, who many credit with taking a hard line with abusers and with Maciel, while at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was not immune to this. See the video of his slapping a reporter who asked him about Maciel.) It’s not hard to extrapolate this into a disregard for victims and their families. That is, if a bishop won't speak to the police or to the media, why would he speak to a victim or a parent?