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The Lord of History, by Msgr. Eugene Kevane. ©2003 The Miriam Press. All Rights Reserved Epilogue- — The Centenary of “Aeterni Patris” The centenary of the Encyclical Aeterni Patris is itself a historical landmark that conveys meaning. Why is this the case? Because it marks a succession of one kind or another in the academic and catechetical orders of teaching in the Catholic Church.161 But what kind of succession? In answer, one may draw some corollaries of points mentioned in the course of the preceding study. The second century of Aeterni Patris appears quite different in present prospect than Pope Leo XIII had hoped, because the reception of his program for the renewal of Christian Philosophy in the academic institutions of the Catholic Church has been different than that for which he hoped. Thus Aeterni Patris itself, in the vicissitudes of its first century, illustrates a succession in things which ministers to a philosophical understanding of recent Church History. The Academic Order The Holy See was motivated in the program of Aeterni Patris by a pastoral concern for Catholic student youth. Through these young people schooled in philosophically renewed academic institutions of the Church, the Holy See looked further to a wholesome effect upon the threatened foundations of a now-secularized Christian culture, at home in the West, but spreading its diseased condition to the entire world. Aeterni Patris, carrying the teachings of Vatican I into effect, literally had to be done as a part of the pastoral care of souls. For the effects of the philosophical apostasy had already fastened upon the academic order of Western colleges and universities, even the Catholic ones, and had even begun to infiltrate into the seminaries which prepare young men for the Catholic priesthood. This latter fact involves the catechetical order as well, for young men by their very preparation for the priesthood are prepared to be the leaders of the catechetical ministry. Thus the interior life of the Catholic Church was at stake, especially when one considers that the bishops are priests raised to the fullness of the Apostolic Succession and Ministry of the Word. There were therefore concomitant effects of the highest order associated with the primary intention of a pastoral care of Catholic young people in their academic studies. The Holy See hoped a great hope. By means of the renewal of Christian Philosophy, the priesthood and its catechetical order would be protected; and the example and the leadership of Catholic young people restored to their rightful heritage in fundamental thinking would have a salutary effect upon society at large. In fact, Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris expresses the hope that academic professors imbued with Modern Philosophy would recognize through the ministry of their Catholic colleagues the inherent superiority of this Christian Philosophy, with its metaphysical openness to the intelligent Supreme Being, and that the recognition would occasion their recovery of the Catholic Faith itself. Thus the renewal of Christian Philosophy in the academic institutions of the Catholic Church was to become the source of a salutary recovery of intellectual vision and sanity in the apostolate of Western academic life at large. For the People of God, St. Thomas Aquinas writes, has “a science of those things which can be concluded from the Articles of Faith.”162 It is the Science of Sacred Theology, which takes it first principles and point of departure immediately from God through the revelation proposed by His Teaching Church. Hence the human sciences do not judge it. They stand on a lower level, ministering to it as it itself judges them to be helpful. This science proper to the People of God, furthermore, does not identify itself with any culture it encounters in space and time. It is independent, illuminating from above by virtue of those first principles, the Articles of Faith, which shine through the entire body of its discourse. And so it is actually one consistent whole with Evangelization and Catechesis, and is simply that form of the Church’s teaching that is scientific in mode. Christian philosophy is the first academic operation to receive this illumination, because it acts as a guiding star for fundamental thinking. But as more and more young people, holding this source of light personally in hand, take up all the other various arts, sciences and disciplines of human culture, a wonderful recovery of health through openness to the personal Supreme Being takes place in each of them. Thus the renewed, restored and brightened intelligible light heals and strengthens the values of social life and culture, dependent as they are, as Newman analyzed so well, on the very idea of a university. This light
Such was the hope of Pope Pius IX in convening Vatican I. It was the hope of Leo XIII in the program launched by Aeterni Patris. It has been the hope of each succeeding Supreme Pontiff to John Paul II in his Constitution Sapientia Christiana of April 15, 1979, for the academic order. Will this Constitution be accepted and implemented in the academic institutions of the Catholic Church? Sapientia Christiana stands entirely under the sign of intellectual obedience given out of the virtue of religion. It is the question whether persons of the cloth, they primarily and then the academic laity, are willing to think within the Faith and to administer institutional programs so that they follow it like a guiding star. As the German historians say, each age stands with its own openness to God, free of compulsion from what has gone before. In the drama of the contemporary renewal of Christian Philosophy, everything the Holy See has hoped for in benefit to the academic order and hence to the values of human culture, could take place. Concomitantly, religious education would be healed, secured as authentic catechetics by a priestly ministry shared by many catechetical teachers grounded in their intellectual heritage. The apostolicity of the Catholic Church would thus be projected vigorously intact into the future. Such would be one kind of succession into the second century of Aeterni Patris. On the other hand, the pattern of succession into this coming century of Aeterni Patris may project the tacit opposition to the program that was present in certain quarters of Catholic academic life from the beginning and which became a visibly growing phenomenon beginning with the Juvisy Conference in 1933. In such a case, Catholic academic institutions will become increasingly indistinguishable from the secular campuses in full apostasy. Catholic seminaries will increasingly train young men in the ideology of the apostasy. And religious educators will be prepared more and more to administer a pantheistic religious education on behalf of the apostasy. Thus the agonizing question raised in the Introduction would in such a succession of things become even more acute: If Christ is no longer the center, how can a catechist be Christocentric in teaching? Is not the very profession of the Apostolic Faith in the Lordship of Jesus at stake? The Catechetical Order It is clear that the pattern of refusal of Aeterni Patris by Catholic academic institutions as its first century has gone by poses a quite special challenge to the order of catechetical teaching. If the Constitution Sapientia Christiana is ignored and disobeyed in the years to come by an academic order dedicated to what is called smoothly “a re-dimensioning of the Papacy,” then the challenge to catechetics will become acute and the danger to the Apostolicity of the Catholic Church will become a menacing reality. The first thing in such a case is to recognize accurately and lucidly the nature of the situation. By a turn of Providence ever more recognizable as the Twentieth Century has proceeded, the academic and the catechetical orders of teaching are held separate at the Holy See, with distinct offices located in different Sacred Congregations. This may well indicate the direction in which accuracy and lucidity are to be found. Catechetical teaching will be called upon to become self-aware, cultivating its own free and independent intellectual life by taking the Articles of Faith as a set of principles and point of departure. For the Articles of Faith are already the issue. And if the Constitution Sapientia Christiana is given the treatment envisaged above as one possibility for the second century of Aeterni Patris, then the Articles of Faith will be all that remains to Catholics and to the Catholic Church. The illumination of the values of general cultural life and the temporal order at large will have been snuffed out. Academic institutions generally, whether Catholic or secular, will have become a darkness visible, a darkness ministering to that inhumanity which the Holy See has been foreseeing with pastoral admonition for many decades. It would be a separate study to trace the concern for “The Deposit of Faith” in the documents of the Holy See that bear upon the philosophical apostasy in the once-Christian Western culture. This concern has been present in these documents ever since 1835. It was so at Vatican I. So too in the documents of Leo XIII on “False Americanism in Religion.” John XXIII voiced this concern explicitly when he opened Vatican II. It was the recurring theme of the Pontificate of Pope Paul VI. Why is the Catholic Church interested in Philosophy? Why was there ever such a document as Aeterni Patris? Because “The Deposit of Faith” is not a piece of stone dropped from heaven to be carried forward by the Church like an object in a box. It is to be proclaimed from housetops by living heralds and taught by living teachers who explain its Articles of Faith accurately and responsibly. It is carried by the Church in a process of human discourse, the discourse of teaching, a teaching with authority, not like that of merely human philosophers and theologians. The Catholic Church, in the second century of Aeterni Patris, may well concentrate upon the role of Christian Philosophy in relationship to this Deposit of Faith. For this is the philosophy which is able to give human ear to the abiding meaning of this same deposit. Does this mean that catechesis can dispense with academics? Not at all. It means only that the structural framework might be different. If the large and established academic institutions fail to rise to the level of the Constitution Sapientia Christiana, then the authentic intellectual life of the Catholic Church will of necessity take place in small units such as St. Philip Neri pioneered and which John Henry Newman chose as the medium best suited to the times he foresaw — and already lived in personally. In such small houses of prayer and study an immensely great intellectual life can indeed be cultivated, one that sees the point of Aeterni Patris, one that applies the norms given in Sapientia Christiana for the right way to teach Philosophy and Theology. Such an intellectual life will carry the Deposit of Faith forward by teaching.164 It will be ministry to that kind of catechetical teaching which explains the Articles of Faith and helps those who learn them to deepen their conversion to Him whom the Articles of Faith profess. The catechetical order of teaching is thus specifically distinct from all other kinds and disciplines of teaching. By its didactic explanations of them, it communicates the Articles of Faith as such, expressing the Word of God proposed by the authority of the Teaching Church, ever faithful to the same meaning in which this Church of God always has taught them. It is to secure the natural foundations of this meaning that the renewal of Christian Philosophy, the natural metaphysics of mankind, will serve in its second century.165 And what is this meaning? It is nothing else than Jesus Christ, seen in the fullness of His Lordship which the Apostles’ Creed professes. Christocentrism and the Philosophy of History Not least among the benefits of Christian Philosophy to Evangelization and Catechesis is the light it throws upon the simultaneously two-fold object of Divine Faith. Divine Faith professes Ipsa Veritas, Truth Itself, who is the Supreme Being incarnate now in the fullness of time and able to say in human words: “I am the Truth.” Thus God Himself is the direct object of Divine Faith. But the means whereby the human mind moves toward Him, raises its inner eye to Him, and embraces His goodness with a personal act of its free will, is the doctrine which the Catholic Church proposes to mankind in her Evangelization and Catechesis. This doctrine is the witness of the Church to Jesus Christ. No other witness is available. Peter’s question abides: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” Without the witness of this doctrinal teaching, therefore, only Heidegger’s brief earthy Holzweg remains, a logger’s road that fades away, a dusk that turns into night, the nihilism which Nietzsche foresaw and announced.166 The Christocentrism to which Aeterni Patris and its philosophical renewal minister, as a matter of fact, centers upon the full Jesus Christ of Gospel history, of Eucharistic presence, and of the coming Parousia. It ministers to a recovery of the New Testament as a whole, presaged by the Fifth Weekday Preface of the renewed Roman Rite of Vatican II: “With love we celebrate His death; with living faith we proclaim His resurrection; with unwavering hope we await His return in glory.” For the natural thinking which provides the preambles and the foundations for the Divine Faith of the Catholic Church in the Eucharistic Real Presence of the Risen Jesus Christ is an integral part of the renewal of Christian Philosophy. The linearity of the Judaeo-Christian view of history is not incompatible with the exitus—reditus of St. Thomas’ Summa, for it bears history forward to this present final stage, to this fullness of time, to this Christian Era which is the Eucharistic dawning of the Empire of Christ the King which will last forever.167 The kind of thinking on the meaning and direction of universal history which this present study exemplifies can of course hardly please those whom Maritain has rather incisively termed the ideosophists of the Modernist movement. The Catholic intellectual life of the second century of Aeterni Patris will be called upon to exercise great forbearance toward them, for not a few will be fellow priests, “peace-priests,” as it were, who will think to accommodate with an outwardly triumphant Marxism. A situation is developing which calls for forbearance, patience, and much fraternal dialogue with them designed to help them see that their shallow kind of ecumenism obstructs that true ecumenism which already professes the Apostles’ Creed and which is gradually discovering the Victim for sin, the Lamb of God really present and offered daily in the Sacrifice of the New Testament. But there will always be not a few priests and religious who already give a hearing to this kind of thinking about the wonderful works of God “from Genesis to the present times of the Church.” Already the younger ones are at hand. They recognize in the Christian philosophy of history the perspective of Newman, Aquinas and Augustine, the perspective proper to those who wish to abide in communion with the Church of the Apostles. With such priests and religious there will be the immense body of the Catholic laity, raising their families and deeply concerned for the eternal salvation of their children.168 For all such persons, Christocentrism is of the essence. For them, Peter’s question abides: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” These Catholic priests, religious and laity of the second century of Aeterni Patris will have some questions of their own which involve the philosophy of history. For example: Are they who look upon themselves as Catholics, indeed, but updated and “Chardinian,” not benighted and obscurantist like these others, not perhaps going toward someone other than Jesus Christ? Preparing his way? Announcing his coming? Nuntii eius, in Aquinas’ perceptive phase? But this coming one, who will he be? What good will he do? What lies beyond his deceptive promises? Will he raise anyone up on the last day? Is it not better to be faithful to the Lord of history? The particular moment of the centenary of Aeterni Patris brings such questions to mind. They imply the Christocentric answer to which the Christian philosophy of history points, the answer which begets confidence for the coming second century of the program of Vatican I, Vatican II and the Holy See on behalf of the natural metaphysics of mankind. For these questions call for the program which helps “reveal to minds... with ever increasing clarity the Mystery of Christ, which affects the whole course of human history, exercises unceasing influence on the Church, and operates mainly through the ministry of the priest.”169 | ||
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