Dual loyalties in Catholic theology

...In effect, Catholics are still fighting over the Enlightenment...

...While it is true that at some important moments in the past Catholics acted as though "nothing human is alien" to the church, that maxim has become systematic and commonplace in the thought and action of many Catholics, and especially many theologians, only since Vatican II...

...Differences are noted...

...William James is correct...

...The few who were commanded to silence in those days kept that silence without public complaint, and kept at their work...

...I am being indicted for selling out...

...It is in these darker moments when the obedient silence of Murray, Teilhard, Congar, de Lubac, is so attractive...

...I read the National Review religiously, was convinced by the philosophical reasoning against birth control, and could not for the life of me understand why anyone would want a vernacular liturgy...

...there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism...

...5. All traditions and authorities are subject to the test of experience and reason, and all are subject to criticism, including the Enlightenment values and the Christian movement and its teachings...

...Is it possible that one could reasonably and in good conscience draw on traditions which have been antagonistic to one another over centuries...

...Thus, sacraments are texts...

...Thus, autobiography has its place...

...Theologians sign statements of concern, but with regret and caution, worried that even their moderate language is inflammatory...

...4. Pluralism of beliefs is a blessing, not a curse...

...If the ideologically fragmented theological groups celebrate the Eucharist together, it is most likely in large crowds and on occasions that cannot be avoided...

...The Catholic University of America may be Catholic, but it is no longer an American university in his view: It has surrendered its text...

...Catholic liberals and conservatives have become practicing separatists much in the style of American Protestant fundamentalists...

...Work on the texts of Aquinas shaped Lonergan and Rahner, but there was other leaven...

...One is rhetorical—civility is surrendered, and one cares little about the mind and heart and feelings of those with whom one argues...

...No wonder the cardinal is a bit pinched, worried, and determined in his guardianship...

...Another finds a source of ethical principle in the history and experience of the American university...

...in fact, I believe it is the most pressing task, the most prominent method, and the most glorious opportunity of contemporary Catholic theology...

...As a consequence, I am driven to justify again and again, to myself and others, the theology that has crept upon me over the past three decades...

...Here I merely wish to expose my position and the objections to it, and as well to make the claim that my position is shared deeply and widely among my colleagues though they often do not advert to it...

...It is the spirit of the church overseer who, as Paul said, must take note of the ears which itch for new things...

...Things changed...

...It inclines to be a suspicious spirit, the spirit of a father who sees a child playing too close to the road, a spirit nervously sensitive to the sound of a strange voice, the voice of a prophet, say, or of straying sheep, or of a wolf...

...The old spirit is not entirely lost to Catholics—they do not, with few exceptions, rush to combat...

...That obligation to criticism is individual as well as communal...

...Aren't we like Reform and Reconstructionist Jews who, as their Orthodox and Hasidic co-religionists charge, no longer share an orthodox faith but nonetheless practice Judaism as a form of religio-cultural homemaking...

...The College Theology Society, the Catholic Theological Society of America, and the Catholic Biblical Association have been abandoned by their more conservative members and do nothing to recall them...

...3. Aren't we professional theologians a "religious elite" and a "knowledge class" whose "new class" interests lead us to espouse liberal causes and grasp for power in the church...

...The other is the tradition of the Great Church...

...How can a theologian consider himself or herself responsible to a secular tradition of thought and action and yet still think of himself or herself as a Catholic theologian...

...The spirit that comes to birth in the base communities of Latin America cannot simply be equated with the spirit of the theologians of North America...

...Do we feel like Catholics but no longer believe...

...we are to love those who are our enemies, and turn the other cheek when we are struck...

...I rely on them now to keep me from misunderstanding God and the church...

...Rynne and Kung, taking a leaf from another book, changed thinking and perception...

...In our country one theologian pores over the tomes of the structuralists and the deconstructionists, the texts of the current academic culture, assessing them for the church and measuring their assessment of the church...

...While I was in the church when I came to these convictions, I did not learn these things from the church...

...The theologians, of course, had been reading other than Christian texts and were reading the scriptural texts in their light...

...I believe now that the periti called on two interacting traditions for their theology and spirituality, one of which I would call "civil" for the lack of a better term, and by it I mean other voices in the city...

...As John XXIII put the ideal to the council fathers, recalling an old saying: in necessariis, unitas...

...we have put aside the old self and put on Christ...

...individual self-interest and tribalism, including Catholic tribalism, are the abstractions...

...There will be mistakes, both by those who journey and those who warn...

...Some of this new awareness came to me through those periti who had to justify their every move by appeals to the Catholic tradition, but whose geist had something to it that was genuinely alien to CounterReformation and antimodernist Catholicism and perhaps to the Catholic tradition as a whole...

...There is far more to Catholicism than the Counter-Reformation church, just as there are wells of experience and knowledge enshrined in the texts of other religions and of the Enlightenment and "modern secularity" which had been forbidden me...

...his biography, like that of Gandhi, travels across barriers between churches and traditions...

...it requires them...

...It may be a stage in the quest for truth, but it is a blessed stage...

...in dubiis, libertas ; in omnibus, caritas...

...My religious and theological liberalism has to do with years of reading the works of American philosophers and theologians who had little but contempt for my church, and this includes nearly every American thinker from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and the Niebuhrs...

...Kant is correct: one must assume responsibility for one's beliefs and questions as well as one's actions...

...Shall we listen or shall we not...

...Only then was the sin of my church against the Jews over centuries revealed and the myth of the impeccability of pope and bishops broken...

...they return from shore leave with very odd gifts indeed...

...II There is an ideal against which all this can be judged...

...A third wanders the pathways of New Age consciousness seeking Commonweal 31 January 1992: 13 the truth of this curiosity, and finds that path to illumine and to be illumined by Catholic mystical theology...

...Boff stopped and so did Matthew Fox...

...From the Reformed tradition and especially from Karl Barth, Kung learned more than a matter of rhetorical style, namely that the church cannot live honestly without public criticism, for its leaders cannot be simply counted upon to do the right thing...

...I will outline several serious objections to my position, and then make a plea for conversation about the habit some theologians have of taking the texts of other traditions as their own and adding them to the classic Catholic texts—for one of the areas of crisis in the church and in theology pertains to this difference in theological and spiritual practice...

...Isn't it we who have lost touch with the realities of the church, of the gospel...

...This was the chief work of the council...

...Bernard Lonergan not only argued with but absorbed Hume and Kant, Hegel and Husserl, and Droysen and Vico...

...To this day he often offends our Catholic linguistic piety by speaking of church leaders in terms that would please a devotee of the Protestant principle...

...Finding the truth or convincing the opponent is not the aim of most of the argument in the current Catholic scene: the truth has been found and the opposition is lost...

...Before Vatican II, and within living memory, there were a few significant disagreements among theologians...

...The ideal was stated in the midst of all those arguments and conversations that erupted at the very outset of Christianity, in every community of which we have any knowledge...

...I stood aghast hearing Daniel Berrigan denouncing the American government and president for murder in Vietnam...

...The questions force me back upon presuppositions, for the very charges themselves reveal to me that I no longer share the view of theology that undergirds them...

...At the council it became clear that repressing the Modernists at the beginning of the century and the Nouvelle theologie in the middle had only delayed the inevitable need to struggle with the question of whether the "world" had something to teach the church as well as the church the "world," or, to put it in the terms introduced above, whether there are texts other than the Catholic classics to be read and mediated theologically...

...The theologians I read in the 1950s who argued about the indwelling of the Trinity meant to convince their opponents...

...Once qualifications have been added and once we have reaffirmed the justice and prescience of long-standing Catholic, and especially papal, criticism of modernity, it remains that many Catholic theologians now stand firmly within the liberal and Enlightenment traditions as well as within the tradition of their own church...

...That is why they are not Protestants and that is why they shut up when told to do so...

...3. Loyalty to the human community is an ideal that transcends loyalty to tribe, nation, class, and to church...

...I watched blacks being beaten (I still do), and Martin Luther King, Jr., killed...

...It sounded perfectly Protestant to me, and that is precisely what it was—an explosion of neo-orthodox Protestant rhetoric inside the Catholic church...

...Frankly, I admire that response—silence, patience, hard work, and especially vindication...

...It ought not preclude conversation and argument...

...Theology for me runs between and among the texts, mediating one to complete the other...

...Commonweal 31 January 1992: 9 My subject, then, is the development of dual loyalties in theology...

...I did not begin as a liberal, but as a political and religious conservative, believing that Franco had saved Western civilization and the church by killing socialists, Communists, and anarchists, and that Senator Joseph McCarthy would save us once again...

...Kung is a burr in this crisis in contemporary Catholicism because, among other things, he insists on reading alien texts and speaking in an alien tongue...

...By now it should be clear what I mean by the claim that I have two "texts...

...I watched the Vietnam War with growing horror and listened to the lies of my political leaders...

...Aren't our causes and prejudices the same as those of the American academic elite and no longer those of the church...

...14: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...

...The theologian must come to understand the new loyalty and its relation to the old loyalty to Catholic and Christian texts...

...The affair of Charles Curran, rhetorically restrained on both sides, taught us some lessons, one of which is important for this essay: In the Curran case, Cardinal Ratzinger resolutely refused to accord ecclesial status to Curran's texts, to the history and documents of academic freedom in the American university...

...Theology, then, mediates the message of the church to the world but also the messages of the world to the church...

...Arguments begin...

...Theologians, in other words, act as if they are no longer restricted to the texts of their tradition...

...We are no longer in a single tradition on which we can draw for spiritual sustenance...

...Hone answers "yes" to any of my three questions, even adding qualifications, has not one resigned in fact from the fellowship of ecclesial theologians whose sole task is the interpretation of Catholic texts...

...It also became clear that church leaders, theologians as well as bishops, did not agree on the value of the question much less on its answers...

...The great text for Christians is the Scripture which tells us of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and of the foundation of the church in his name...

...Moreover, the council fathers, its periti, and its documents, tore down walls that had sealed me off from much of my past, my Catholic past as well as my political heritage, transforming my evaluation of the church, the gospel, and the world...

...The consequent conversation and argument are democratic experience...

...Cardinal Ratzinger and others represent, in my view, an older spirit, perhaps the spirit of post-Tridentine Catholicism and of the pastoral epistles...

...I will proceed in this fashion: I. I will sketch in broad strokes the polemical caste of current theology and church life, and take that as a clue to a fissure in Catholic loyalties...

...There is no ready answer to these objections...

...Be that as it may, some theologians begin to regard the alien texts and even the alien spiritual discipline as their own...

...we are in traditions of faith and we can and we must draw upon them...

...One no longer argues with, one argues against...

...The odium theologicum today is perhaps no worse and even may be less than at many points in the past—surely we could call on Muslims, Modernists, witches, Jews, Albigensians, and Huguenots as witnesses to what the Catholic church can accomplish when it sets 10: 31 January 1992 Commonweal its mind to hating, and in that light, things seem relatively mild at present...

...Right now the Catholic church is in a broil over the list and the meaning of texts...

...Josiah Royce is correct...

...The issue appears at two levels...

...Conversations cease, argument becomes perfunctory and a mode of attack or a solicitation of allies...

...Commonweal 31 January 1992: 11 The latter point is the crucial one for my case: the work of the council had its major sources in the Catholic tradition itself, but there was, and there remains, something else at work...

...The rightist opposition is justified in its claim that the liberals are importing something new...

...Here I would interpret the first to mean that theology proceeds from faith and is a reflection on its meaning...

...Francis of Assisi is one of the rare bridge texts...

...The theologian draws on all promising human traditions even while the church serves as a community of life and belief...

...In Latin America that spirit speaks with the tongue of religious reformation, and of political and economic revolution, a spirit seeking and finding new connections between the gospel and the culture...

...This is an old story, and we are told in our academic lore of the use of the pagan texts by the church fathers and of Aristotle by Aquinas, and some even suggest that when Cardinal Ratzinger objects we hear the voice of Tertullian or of Bonaventure...

...I was unable to vote for John Kennedy in 1960 on both political and religious grounds, and found myself in a crowd in Yonkers cheering Richard Nixon...

...if I am not mistaken, it is also over what are and are not central and acceptable texts to interpret...

...how shall we be known except by the love we have for one another...

...It is primarily a quality of human relationships that pervades or should pervade all aspects of life, including one's religion...

...Something very basic is at stake in the church...

...I will refer to the scriptural ideal against which the polemical atmosphere may be judged and try to lay out my own dual loyalty and explain it autobiographically...

...I do not think this is a supra-ecclesial spirituality...

...Likewise in Asia, Catholic theologians find new resources of spirit in Buddhism and Hinduism, and as a result there are now Catholic ashrams, Catholic Zen masters, Catholic yogis...

...They are living out a Catholic journey that has been named by John Dunne a spirituality of passing over and coming back, a bumpy road indeed...

...They assume increasingly that their Catholic classics belong to all, and that world classics are theirs as well...

...And my religious change paralleled my political change...

...Moreover, my religious tradition is so massively at odds with so much of the Enlightenment that, in my twenty-year tightrope walk, I often have difficulty seeing steadily how the two might fit together...

...In effect, there is little communion, not to say discussion, between Right and Left...

...The organic unity and the practical life of the church in charity is a value which Catholic theologians, with few exceptions, have placed above convictions, theological opinions, and beliefs for centuries...

...It bore fruit at the council...

...The broil is not only over what the central text means...

...But since the council, there are different spirits in our land and in other lands acting in peculiar ways and speaking in peculiar tongues...

...the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars is the haven of right-wing theologians and intellectuals...

...His is the spirit of guardianship, of responsibility to what has come to be, of testing, of decision, of crisis, a spirit which strives to take the whole church and its life into account...

...About this Anne Muggeridge is correct: what she calls "the revolution" is not Catholic at least to some extent...

...I think it is also fair to say that I hold these views with religious intensity...

...The theologians could at least take comfort in the fact that the bitterness of the integralist heresy hunts of the first half of the century was no longer acceptable and, though everyone remembered what might at any time happen to the theologically venturesome, something close to civility reigned...

...Dewey is correct again...

...The theologian's loyalty is soon subject to question, not least of all his or her own question...

...Over the years a sea-change occurred in my understanding of and attitude toward my religious and political heritage...

...After the debates of the past thirty years the question still remains: were they correct to do so...

...They must be replaced by argument, by open disagreement, by conversation, if the church is not to suffer again the wounds it suffered at the beginning of this century...

...The Reformation was an argument over the meaning of texts that almost at once degenerated into polemic: The reformers called us Jews and we called them Gnostics...

...Since I cannot speak for the convictions of others, I shall speak directly only of my own, in hope of sharpening our perception of the impact of the alien text and focusing debate on it...

...Prudence and love for the church may subdue differences but they remain, and only a change of mind can remove them...

...They, in part, make up a spirituality, a way of being religious not simply in philosophical thought but in action, in the bent of my life...

...Let me pose the problem of "fit" in three questions that have been put to me by friends: 1.Are not liberals in the last analysis merely romantic Catholics whose intellectual vision and beliefs are essentially secular...

...At darker moments, however, we seem more a set of interest groups, defending turf and conniving to impose our will upon the church, or, in the case of the Left in these days, to avoid the imposition of the will of others...

...It is the practice of democracy...

...by analogy, the rituals, stories, symbols, and even the lives (here we come upon biography and autobiography) of the community's members are also texts...

...At the very outset Christians differed with the Jews on how to read the primal texts common to church and synagogue, and were madly driven to show that God no longer loved Jews nor they God...

...Even as they criticize the Enlightenment in the name of the wisdom found in the church, the Enlightenment is as much the theologians' home as is the ecclesial tradition...

...The second level of fissure is closer to the heart of the matter...

...I think they meant to reconcile those two traditions...

...This latter fact deserves some attention: some Catholic theologians regard texts from traditions other than Catholic important enough to comment on and, indeed, seem to think that texts which are not Catholic, and even not Christian, are theologically significant...

...Argument can culminate in conversation in which everyone learns or it can degenerate into polemic in which no one learns...

...In one sense they do what Catholics at their very best have always done: absorb, appropriate, baptize a new and foreign culture...

...He has no easy time keeping the sailors on board...

...In my terms, the counterrevolution wants to hold theology to the texts and mode of ecclesiastical text production and commentary of post-Tridentine Catholicism...

...the counterrevolution that Muggeridge applauds is the political attempt to restore that spirit...

...In the decades before the council, Pope Pius XII had to warn a group of French theologians to end certain discussions they were having, for example, on the historical character of the Genesis account and the church's teaching that we are descended from a single original pair...

...and the second, to mean that in the modem context, belief is always accompanied by questions about its truth and these questions accompany the act of reflection from beginning to end, questions which are not finally answered...

...Let me list a few of my convictions that I attribute to sources other than Catholic: 1. Democracy is not a political organization to be equated with a constitution and a bill of rights and the division of powers in a state...

...They had, some would say, alien sources of mind and spirit...

...The Enlightenment criticism of traditional theology is correct: ecclesiastical dogmatism makes genuine faith and belief impossible...

...A fourth pokes through the pericopes of the patriarchal gospels to a text behind our text, and finds hidden there an egalitarian church and a hope for women different from that of his Eminence and his Holiness...

...No longer, for example, could I identify the church of my childhood with the spotless bride of Christ, without remainder...

...He or she must come to reckon with the words of Jesus about divided hearts...

...In every instance theology must take account of its unbelief as well as its belief...

...While as a child, watching Movietone News in a Bronx theater, I recognized the terrible sin of the Holocaust, only gradually I realized the difference my church should have made to the Jews between 1932 and 1945...

...I watched transfixed in an auditorium at Yale University as he argued, in heavily accented English and with thrilling biblical logic, that the ecclesiastical war was over the liberty of the children of God, that the Scripture was the judge of the church's leaders, and that faith must shine forth in a church that had made too much of works...

...The present struggle in Western Roman Catholicism, while it often appears to be over what Vatican II meant, is in fact over whether the council was correct in what it did...

...But still there is among theologians a great deal of line drawing, of branding the opposition as straying from the gospel path, of reasserting old patterns of authority and obedience, and of pitching liberal shibboleths at bishops and pope...

...Even now we Catholics shut up when told to...

...In the last analysis, of course, the church as a community will decide whether these texts are worth the attention of Catholics, but in the meantime this phenomenon divides the household of Catholic theologians...

...For one thing, I am not a holy man, and my powers of spiritual discernment are unrefined...

...But a problem arises: texts differ, texts breed commentaries, and commentaries differ...

...The "revolution" in the council and its aftermath was a decisive, if not clean, break with the spirit of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the very least...

...I doubt that Hans Kung and Joseph Ratzinger long for a conversation in which each hopes for theological illumination from the other...

...Rahner studied with Heidegger and echoed his existentialism...

...In fact, I know theologians who spend their lives reading these alien texts not simply because they are interesting, nor only because they are important for interpreting the Christian texts, but because they are revelatory in their own right...

...I found out that William Buckley's views did not do much for the poor for whom I worked...

...The search, discovery, and communication of truth is not only a means but also an end...

...The right wing—von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Muggeridge, James Hitchcock, and George Kelly—are not far off on this, for Rahner, Lonergan, and those other giants of twentiethcentury Catholic theology spoke with a voice unfamiliar to the ear of my childhood Catholicism...

...Has not one thereby justified the separatism now so much part of Catholic intellectual life...

...Xavier Rynne, in his series of articles for the New Yorker, chronicled the days of preparation for the council and its first sessions, telling a tale as gripping as anything a church mouse like myself had ever read...

...The danger is not mistakes—from these we may all benefit—but separatism, polemic, suspicion, resort to ecclesiastical power, evasion, dissimulation, disingenuousness: these unworthy things will hurt us now as they have in the past...

...In the exhilarating and difficult thirty years since, the temperature of church discourse has risen...

...Teilhard, caught meditating deeply on the wonders of creation and science, had to put his marvelous and mythic manuscripts away...

...III This dual loyalty creates a problem, does it not...

...The drift to the Left was slow in coming and painful...

...Curran's equally resolute refusal to abandon those texts reveals their sacral status for him...

...However, repression and even repentance do not end differences— they simply put them in a new frame of reference and control...

...They try to fulfill what they believe is the mandate of the council and so of the Holy Spirit, appropriating the authentically human wherever it is found...

...One wishes it were a matter only of personalities...

...Finally, I 12: 31 January 1992 Commonweal believe the convictions are responsible for much of the present broil in the church, because the leaders of the church and some Catholics do not believe these and regard them, quite rightly, as alien to the ecclesial tradition...

...we are no longer Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female, we are a new creature in Christ who saves us...

...But in this case they do it in a culture which has risen despite the consistent and even violent opposition of their church...

...Cardinal Ratzinger's letter on theologians strikes a ready chord in the Catholic psyche in the sense that Catholics remain peculiarly ill at ease with dissent and even with conversations that might lead to it...

...they are not for Protestants or Hindus, and Martin Luther and Sankara have not been texts for Catholics...

...We are witnessing a breakdown of ecclesial life...

...More than my besetting sin, logical inconsistency, is charged here...

...The propositions listed above are in part what I mean by liberalism, and I suspect that many Catholics share them...

...III...

...John Dewey is correct...

...Do we allow our liberal politics to set the agenda for the church, turning the church into another social organization with a "viewpoint," and no gospel to speak of...

...They intend continuity with the church of the ages, certainly, but they draw on new sources of thought and action as well as the old, sources different from their more cautious contemporaries...

...But compared with the spirit of the cardinal, North and Latin America are at one...

...We also number among the Christian texts worth attention, comment, and argument the important historical statements that propose in doctrinal terms the meaning of Jesus' life and the meaning of the God whom we find in him...

...I do not defend my position and my interpretation of the current scene so much as unfold it for the sake of discussion...

...2. Democracy is based on freedom of inquiry and communication, and freedom of inquiry and communication are essential to it...

...How can we disagree without destroying charity, without withdrawing from the table or being unseated...

...I do not think a theologian can do otherwise than to take the human family as his or her own, and its religions and philosophies as his or her own, and to search the intellectual and spiritual terrain for proclamations to the church at the very same time as he or she interprets for the culture-at-large the faith, hope, and love of Catholics...

...The human community is the fact, not the abstraction...

...Though the conversation partners have good reason to suspect one another, they have no theologically or religiously justifiable reason to cut off conversation as they have...

...In effect the pope shut them up...

...The church appears divided into rhetorical camps, each with aims and language for categorizing opponents...

...6. Theology is not only fides quaerens intellectum, it is also intellectus quaerens fidem...

...2. Do we not distort the church by importing an alien vision of a political community as the standard for church life...

...They are willing to find value even in what has been historically alien to the church, in what has pitched itself against the church, and what the leaders of our church have condemned and still condemn...

...It is the spirit of unitas in necessariis, the spirit that has kept Catholicism united for centuries...

...The double rootage of Catholic theology appeared above ground several times in our century and was buried again...

...I am annoyed by these questions—and they worry me...

...An argument is no longer an exchange meant to disclose truth but a way of upending the enemy...

...In the cardinal 's view, Curran's texts undercut Curran's Catholicity...

...There is one body though many members, one spirit though many gifts...

...The change in Catholic theology cannot be accounted for by the disingenuous claims of some liberals that they are recouping earlier Catholic sources of liberalism...

...So Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola are texts for Catholics...

...The council uncovered it, and it was nearly unchecked between the council and 1979...

...The most optimistic way of looking at this state of affairs would be to say that different portions of the church have developed into "publics," into informed bodies of people who know what is at stake for them, and who are willing to argue their case publicly...

...Matteo Ricci is taking his revenge on Rome at long last...

...Cardinal Ratzinger does not invite Edward Schillebeeckx, Charles Curran, or Leonardo Boff to Rome in order find out what they think or to persuade them to think differently...

...It is an admirable form of Catholic spirituality...

...Authentic religion and an authentic religious community are democratic...

...I confess that my conscience is not entirely at ease...

...John Courtney Murray was ordered to publish no more on his theory of church and state relations, a theory not derived from the Catholic tradition but from Catholic participation in the "American project...

...With some few exceptions, I do not think there is a conversation at all, except within interest groups...

...While there is a "deep pit" between Curran and Ratzinger that even Abraham cannot cross bringing a drop of cool water from one to the other, I fear as well that the fissures between Catholic theologians run deep and are widening...

...These days some theologians use "text" in an extended sense...

...The convictions must enter our conversation and reasons must be given for them...

...To this extent the theologian has traditions and not simply a tradition...

...The contempt outraged me, but their thinking about the meaning and forms of human life fascinated and held me, and still does...

...Hans Küng brought it all home in his tour of the United States in 1962 when he uttered the first direct public criticism of Roman authority by a Catholic that I had heard in my twenty-six years...