FROM THE ARCHIVES: Pope John XXIII
Novak, Michael
li was this warm human being, our brother, but that it was the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic church who was this warm human person. There have been periods in papal history when it seemed...
...the Latin Scholastics coalesce ethics and canon law, and minimize risk and individuality...
...So doing, he made it possible for Catholics to speak of good news to their companions who do not see, and to learn from those who do not see the humility of the human situation...
...For during the pontificate of John XXIII we have heard the voice of the Good Shepherd, solicitous not only for those inside, but for those outside the sheepfold as well...
...Ambition and lust, love and sacrifice, pride and passion recur because man cannot escape his origin, limitations, or history...
...He cast the church free from the island of Latin Scholasticism on which she has for some centuries been marooned, and launched her once more on the currents of human history with hope, with courage, with joy, with the exhilaration proper to those who see in the darkness the star of eternal life...
...He urged them to rise, but they stayed on their knees...
...Commonweal | 6 August 11, 2000...
...In 1963, Robert McAfee Brown was professor of religion at Stanford, and wrote a regular column for Commonweal...
...they are not present in the moral handbooks of the Latin Scholastics...
...They are, rather, the sort of verity William Faulkner spoke of in his memorable acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Prize: founded not in definitions but in that physical and emotional and only partly rational organism, man in history...
...But whatever their glories, and in spite of their contrary assumption, the Latin Scholastics cannot claim Aquinas as their mentor...
...it is difficult for them to believe they have been wrong, or even only half wrong...
...Are they not Romani...
...From God's point of view, man's nature may lie limpid and apparent, and revelation may help to fix some of these insights for finite men...
...Thus the use of the words "absolute," "unchanging," "eternal" must be taken in a limited, special sense...
...That remark now sounds curiously dated, as Karl Barth would probably be the first to acknowledge...
...He currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Are they not--yes, even--the church...
...It is in this sense only that there is a "natural law," progressively made clear in history, never quite complete, always affected by the continuing dialogue between God and his people down the generations...
...The Protestant theologian Karl Barth once remarked, after surveying the history of the Papal See for several centuries, "I cannot hear the voice of the Good Shepherd from this See of Peter...
...He received a group of Roman Catholics who immediately knelt in his presence...
...It is even difficult for them to accept the possibility of another point of view than their own...
...they cannot claim the world-view, only the words, of Aristotle...
...Aristotle (and Aquinas after him) refused to turn ethics into a logical or legal system, and insisted on the element of risk in moral decision...
...and the differences are hard to characterize in a single descriptive phrase...
...But from an empirical human point of view, men learn the natural law only gradually and according to the lessons of history...
...There have been periods in papal history when it seemed to us that the splendor of the Holy See was a bit tarnished in comparison to the simplicity of the Holy Family...
...At times it has not been as clear to us as it should have been that the pope was servus servorum Dei, and some popes left an image of human pretension rather than divine condescension...
...He wrote about the council, which he attended as an observer...
...The emphasis which Aristotle places on the individual person in the Nichomachean Ethics, for example, and the emphasis he places on historical development and "what is" rather than "what ought to be" in his Politics, are clearly present in Pope John's encyclicals...
...The "eternal truths" of which Pope John speaks are not the sort that are written as definitions "beyond the firmament...
...The very qualities of humanity and humility that so endeared Pope John to the non-Catholic world are illustrated by another audience shortly after his pontificate began...
...Understandably, those accustomed to viewing the world in the manner of Latin Scholastics are outraged at having their viewpoint about "the essence" of things seriously impugned...
...he was in Rome during Vatican II and published widely about it...
...Thus Pope John's list of natural rights was not evident, in theory or in practice, when the gospels were first preached, nor, indeed, in the thirteenth or even in the nineteenth century...
...You kneel only before Christ...
...To which Pope John responded, "You do not kneel before the vicar of Christ...
...Pope John succeeded in returning the church to this ancient perspective...
...Against the advice of the "prophets of doom," he returned Catholicism to the world...
...Michael Novak [] Pope John's program, like the council's thus far, was different in style from Latin Scholasticism...
...In 1963, Michael Novak was the author of the novel The Tiber Was Silver and a frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...You are the vicar of Christ," one of them asserted...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
