The Profligate Love of God

Yesterday, we talked about the Reactionary fear that God might extend his saving grace to people Reactionaries want to bar from the Kingdom of Heaven, including the unborn, if possible. This fear gives rise to a conception of the sacraments as being primarily designed by God, not as sure encounters with grace, but as reducing valves for excluding as many people as possible from the love of God.

The problem is that this endlessly restrictive view of the love of God is now beginning to eat away at the sanity of Reactionaries who preen themselves as the Most Prolifeyest Catholics ever. Not only are they at war with the Church about who they will allow God to save, they are increasingly at war with the human race about who gets to be treated as having full human dignity.

Some background: At Vatican II, the Church arrived at an epoch-making formulation. It was, as ever, not something new in the Church’s teaching, being a statement with roots in both Genesis and basic Christology. But it was something the Church had never quite formulated in these words before. Namely, due to the fact that we are made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27) and to the fact that Christ has died for all to the degree that “There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer” (Council of Quiercy (853): DS 624; cf. 2 Cor 5:15; 1 Jn 2:2), Vatican II responded to the horror inflicted on human beings in the name of a host of human systems and traditions by declaring that “Man is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake”(Gaudium et Spes 24).

It is a monumental development in the Church’s thought and is a bullet to the brain of every attempt to subject the good of the human person to any human system or ideology, whether political, social, economic, philosophical, scientific, racial, national–or ecclesial.

The Church, as is often her custom after formulating a Spirit-led development of doctrine, then adjourned the Council, the bishops went home–and promptly failed to grasp the implications of their own teaching.

That often sounds weird to onlookers, but it is something we see repeatedly in the Church’s history–and for good reason: developments of doctrine arrived at by the Church in council and in union with Peter are ultimately the work, not of human beings, but of the Holy Spirit. When the Church articulates the mind of Christ, she speaks “beyond herself”. It’s very like the phenomenon described by Peter:

The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Peter 1:10-12)

In other words, the prophets–like the bishops in council–don’t quite know what they are talking about, because the Spirit is speaking through them. The prophet (and the bishops after a council) end up “inquiring” what the full meaning is of what they themselves have said. And they don’t always get it right away. Peter himself demonstrates this. Under inspiration, he declares to Jesus “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). The reason we know he spoke under inspiration is that Jesus himself says so: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). Indeed, Jesus, who very clearly claims for himself the messianic title “Son of David”, even rewards Peter with the astonishing gift of a perpetual office with the authority to bind and loose (“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt 16:18–19). That statement does not arise in a vacuum. It is a callback to an episode in the history of the Davidic kingdom when Isaiah likewise informs the bad steward in the house of David (Shebna) that he is getting sacked and replaced by Eliakim, who likewise receives the “key” of the kingdom of another son of David:

Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts, “Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: What have you to do here and whom have you here, that you have hewn here a tomb for yourself, you who hew a tomb on the height, and carve a habitation for yourself in the rock? Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you, and whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land; there you shall die, and there shall be your splendid chariots, you shame of your master’s house. I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station. In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your belt on him, and will commit your authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a sure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father’s house. And they will hang on him the whole weight of his father’s house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons. In that day, says the LORD of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a sure place will give way; and it will be cut down and fall, and the burden that was upon it will be cut off, for the LORD has spoken.” ((Is 22:15–25)

The parallel becomes even clearer in the Aramaic Jesus spoke given that the high priest who will strive to get Jesus condemned is “Caiaphas” while Simon bar Jonah is renamed “Kefa” (variously “Cephas” and “Peter”) in the New Testament.

And yet, despite all this, Peter immediately is granted by God the vital gift of discovering that none of these gifts and graces means that he is incapable of being a doofus. So within two sentences we immediately find Peter resoundingly discovering that the Holy Spirit is not a vaccine against his own frail humanity:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” (Mt 16:21–23)

Nor will this be the only time Peter speaks under inspiration, only to radically fail to grasp the meaning of his own inspired words. In Acts 15, the synod held in Jerusalem to decide what to do about Gentiles who want to become disciples of the Jewish Messiah will memorably sum up its teaching in the words of none other than Peter, who makes clear that Gentile need not practice the ceremonial rites of the Old Covenant in order to become Christian:

“Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” (Ac 15:7–11)

And yet, not long after, we will find Peter chickening out on his own teaching at Antioch, pulling back from eating with Gentiles out of fears of social pressure from Jewish Christians who regarded them as second-class citizens and worried about contracting ritual impurity from them. Paul relates how he had to rebuke Peter for this in Galatians 2:

But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Ga 2:11–14)

And so down the centuries, we find the Church formulating some brilliant insight by the power of the Holy Spirit, and then the members of the Body of Christ adjourning to their ordinary lives and promptly failing to remember or grasp what they themselves have said.

And so, today, we find the pattern still holds. Having formulated the brilliant insight that man is the only creature whom God has will for his own sake, Reactionaries like Bp. Athanasius Schneider will flatly reject the teaching of Gaudium et Spes (as Where Peter Is chronicles here):

96. Then man is not a creature that the Creator has willed for its own sake?¹⁰

No. Although man should never be used as a mere means to an end, the notion that man exists simply “for his own sake” is the self-referential error of anthropocentrism, rooted in the unchristian philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

(Footnote 10 says, “The Council of Vatican II’s document Gaudium et Spes, 24 made the ambiguous affirmation that “man is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.”)

And Bp. Schneider will not stop there. He will go on to draw a conclusion which is directly opposed to the Church’s teaching:

224. Is the dignity of the human person rooted in his creation in God’s image and likeness?

This was true for Adam, but with original sin the human person lost this resemblance and dignity in the eyes of God. He recovers this dignity through baptism, and keeps it as long as he does not sin mortally.

Bp. Schneider, vigilant as Reactionaries always are against one microdrop of the love and grace of God being given to the impure and unworthy, ends up denying not merely saving grace to the saints, but basic human dignity to the unbaptized. Not for him all that pot-smoking 1960s tie-dyed liberalism of saying “all men are brothers and members of the same great human family” Only the baptized have the dignity of the human person, and only those who have not sinned mortally.

Never mind that the quote in the previous paragraph comes not from the hippies who convened Vatican II or the liberal heretic Pope Francis Bp. Schneider so bitterly opposes, but from Pope Pius XI, writing in 1922. Never mind as well that Pius is simply articulating Christian tradition dating back to St. Paul who tells the unbaptized pagans on the Areopagus in Athens:

[H]e made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for
‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your poets have said,
‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ (Ac 17:26–28)

The need to deny both Vatican II and basic human dignity to everybody outside of Fortress Katolicus is so urgent for Bp. Schneider that he does not mind effectively destroying the basis for all human rights for the unbaptized.

Thus, does war with the Tradition by the monomaniac, self-appointed savior of the Church from the Magisterium always end, like the Ourboros, by swallowing its own tail.