'Queen of Victory' pray for us'
Portier, William L.
in Christ affected God's divine nature it would mean that it was someone other than the eternal impassible Creator who was experiencing human suffering. Weinandy comments, "Strange as it...
...Maybe I will...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...In a flashy piece of cultural history published in U.S...
...Since God is incapable of loss or gain, God has no possibility of self-interest either in creating or in any relations with creatures...
...But if God is not impassive in the face of human suffering, God does remain, nevertheless, "impassible," in the classical sense that the divine nature is not subject to change or loss and God is not subject to suffering arising from such change or loss...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...And religions, says anthropologist Clifford Geertz, are cultural systems...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Al McGuire died on January 26...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...God actually experiences something new and knows first hand—as one of us mortals—suffering and anguish within a fallen world...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...As a fifteen-year-old in 1960,1 was proud of JFK...
...For example, Barbara Kraemer shows how the unique blend of developments in American society and within the church itself have not only transfigured the modes and ideals of vowed religious life but continue to pose fundamental questions about its future...
...He called big players "aircraft carriers" and easy put-backs "tap city...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...In Christ, God truly enters into radical historical solidarity with human suffering...
...Such systems might include urban ethnic neighborhoods, parish churches and schools, and even basketball teams...
...Requiescat in pace...
...REV...
...Even with a narrower scope and the appropriate disclaimers, the book's enterprise is still quixotic...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...He goes beyond traditional claims that God's sorrow and grief are merely metaphorical, affirming they are true and actual...
...A different subtitle, something like "Case Studies in Inculturation," would better describe the main issue that cuts across the best essays...
...Until he left television in March 2000, McGuire delighted fans with his zany marriage of basketball savvy and pie de vivre...
...If one more author had been recruited to write a synthetic presentation of the lessons gleaned from these studies, this book would be even more useful...
...That year Al McGuire's Marquette Warriors (they had yet to change their name) took the floor against Dean Smith's North Carolina Tar Heels for the national championship...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...Thomas G. Weinandy University of Notre Dame Press, $22.95,312 pp...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...In many ways the book could serve simply as an introduction to classical Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, creatively explained and developed in the light of contemporary questions...
...They never met nor, it seems, did they ever confer...
...Trying to cover the major aspects of twentieth-century American Catholic church life in one volume is like trying to cover a cathedral with a kerchief...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...And they had Al McGuire...
...All right," McGuire said, "let's show them we're the number-one team in the country and beat the (bleep) out of them...
...A God impassive in the face of the human suffering witnessed in the twentieth century, impassive in the face of the Holocaust, seems, with Camus, to be an "eternal bystander," unmoved by human suffering and so incapable of sympathy and love...
...God will hear you...
...Fisher's "characters" could appeal to ordinary people back in the neighborhood and, at the same time, fashion a highly creative synthesis of varied urban cultural forms...
...As Creator, God is not a creature but the one on whom all creatures depend, and as such God's involvement with creatures is both more intimate and more significant than that of any creature...
...If McGuire stories about going to Mass offended Wake Forest's Billy Packer, McGuire's longtime broadcast partner, Packer never let on...
...It is truly the Son of God who truly is man and so suffers truly as man...
...This is what humankind is crying out to hear, not that God experiences, in a divine manner, our anguish and suffering...but that he actually experienced and knew first hand, as one of us—as man—human anguish and suffering within a sinful and depraved world...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Where do we stand now...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...What was learned...
...Catholic Historian (1995), James Fisher profiled a group of Catholic entertainers and writers from Jackie Gleason to Red Smith...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...McGuire sat on top of a big cultural iceberg, a communion of urban, ethnic, Catholic basketball coaches, players, and fans who have left an indelible mark on the game...
...David O'Brien's title, "Catholic Youth: The Presumed Become the Pursued," sums up the story he tells...
...Weinandy is at once genuinely traditional and genuinely creative, an admirable balance increasingly rare in contemporary theology...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...One reason, I suspect, is that McGuire's New York accent and speech cadence, punctuated with occasional malapropisms, made him sound just like my late father...
...I don't know if it was McGuire who introduced the "Hail Mary pass" into the American sports lexicon, but if s not hard to imagine him invoking it...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...Patricia McDonald traces Catholic biblical scholarship from its European and Protestant tutelage to the full maturity of professional credibility...
...When the Warriors tipped off against North Carolina on that March night in 1977, they were wearing stylish uniforms designed by Bo Ellis, Marquette's star player...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Yet Catholicism was inseparable from the McGuire persona...
...Ultimately Weinandy seems concerned not so much with banning all talk of God's suffering as with cautioning against the loss of a whole theological vocabulary—of natures and persons, substance and essence—that permits the precise distinctions required for a full portrayal of the mystery of the Incarnation...
...Curiously, few, if any, of the tributes to McGuire have mentioned the "C" word...
...But this means that the suffering that God experiences is our suffering, not a special divine version of it occurring in the divine nature...
...John C. Cavadini nathema for centuries, the claim that God suffers is commonplace in many contemporary theologies...
...As Creator, therefore, God's actions toward creatures are not undertaken in order to ease God's suffering or to guard against the possibility of divine loss, and thus only belief in God as impassible Creator is belief in a God of perfectly altruistic love...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...But I was even more proud three years later when Vic Rouse's buzzerbeater won the NCAA tournament for Coach George Ireland's Loyola (Chicago) Ramblers...
...question hovers over the exegetes' conclusions...
...Some would call this a myth...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...A master of improvisation, Al McGuire refined this "regular guy" style to a fine art...
...They will worry that all 42 the precise language about the Incarnation is simply a way of narrowing down the relevance of divine suffering to Christians, a way of reasserting a triumphalist anti-Judaism which, if it did not itself generate the Holocaust, at least prepared the attitude toward the Jews that made such a horror thinkable...
...Marvin, S.D...
...McGuire once challenged Packer and a national television audience to identify the three Vincentian universities...
...Those advocating a passible God, Weinandy claims, have "locked suffering within God's divine nature, [and] in so doing, locked God out of human suffering...
...QUEEN OF VICTORY, PRAY FOR US9 William L. Portier etween 1964 and 1977, Coach Al McGuire took Marquette University on a manic ride to the top of college basketball...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...This is die central truth of the communicatio id.ioma.tum, the suffering of the Impassible...
...A God who does not suffer seems to be a God who is not passionately involved with the world...
...Weinandy presses us here: Are we really ready to give up the claim that God truly and uniquely experiences human suffering as a real, particular human being and so in true solidarity with us...
...Weinandy's book is such a compelling treatment of central Christian doctrines that one is eager to see his thesis formulated in a way that presents no temptation to those who might be inclined to repeat the sins of the anti-Jewish past...
...After winning the national championship in 1977, McGuire retired from coaching and moved to the broadcast booth...
...he was seventy-two years old...
...The Word became flesh, Saint John says...
...Harleys...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...For Weinandy, "only an impassible God, and not a passible God, is truly and fully personal, absolutely and utterly loving...
...By 1977 the NCAA had definitively supplanted New York's NIT as the preeminent national postseason basketball tournament...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Still, following the lead of John Paul II, Weinandy could better balance assertions of the uniqueness of Christian revelation with reminders that God's covenant with Israel is irrevocable...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...The book's answers to these questions remain cloudy because its sixteen contributors worked independently...
...It is the ahistorical suffering of the divine nature which is actually the stuff of myth...
...Even worse, such a God appears complicit in human suffering, since he observes it without passion and is not moved to intervene...
...Who else could compare a player's speed "to the last Mass at a summer resort...
...Weinandy reminds us rather that it is a mystery, susceptible of precise expression if not explanation...
...The moral, as he sees it, is that the church has found a place in America but that place is too cozy...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...Saint John's, DePaul, and Niagara, of course...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Jon Nllson_______________ he title of this book makes a promise that only an encyclopedia could fulfill...
...God's sorrow and grief, though real and not merely metaphorical, do not arise from divine suffering...
...Thus, work for justice must take the socialist 40 NO, NOT EXACTLY Does God Suffer...
...What went right...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...To attribute suffering instead to the divine nature is actually to make God more remote from us...
...Further, if the suffering of God 41...
...He grew up in Rockaway Beach, Queens, graduated from Saint John's University, Queens, and played professional basketball for the New York Knicks...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...Two Johns, Cort and Haughey, offer the most provocative contributions...
...He had no interest in passing as something more generic...
...The two were an adventure in grassroots ecumenism...
...This lack of coordination is a drawback...
...He was indeed a "character," but very much a Catholic character...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...A passible God is no different from a creature...
...Queen of Victory, pray for us," North Carolina was favored to win, but Marquette had Bo Ellis and his funky uniforms...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...The authors were apparently limited to about fifteen pages, yet some produced small masterpieces that highlight ways in which American culture has shaped our Catholicism...
...Incarnate in Christ, however, God not only truly sorrows, but also truly suffers...
...Marquette's eleven postseason appearances under McGuire included two trips to the Final Four of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament and a National Invitation Tournament (NIT) title in 1970...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...Too often the "so what...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Historians point to Jack Kennedy's 1960 election as the sign that Catholics had finally made it in the United States...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...Not much religion going on there, the person said...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Its continuities with pre-Enlightenment traditions of biblical interpretation, its ability to contribute to broad and basic theological and ecclesiological reflection, and the nourishment it offers to the faith life of the church itself have become thin and weak...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Cort maintains that the principles of contemporary socialism are virtually identical with Catholic social teaching...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Listening to Al McGuire do a game on television was the next best thing to watching it with my dad...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...So the book is a collection of essays, a sort of reference work on the topics it covers, rather than a developed and detailed response to its originating questions...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...In terms of popular culture, American Catholics came of age all over again that night...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31 MORE AMERICAN THAN CATHOLIC...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...What went wrong...
...Weinandy worries that contemporary theologians are losing their taste for the "scandal" of the Incarnation as the "culmination and summit of biblical revelation...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...Yet she also notes that the world of the exegetes has become too much a world unto itself...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...No wonder important features like the liturgical revolution, the transformation in the role of the laity, the influence of bishops like Gibbons and Spellman, and the struggles of African-American and Hispanic Catholics for recognition as equal partners in their own church get no essays of their own...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...Key here is the distinction between creature and Creator...
...Dean "The Dream" Meminger, Maurice Lucas, Butch Lee, and the rest came ai Marquette's opponents with the sort of "creative anarchy" to which Fisher attributes the success of the "Ed Sullivan Show...
...Perhaps suspecting 1950s triumphalism, he dismissed it as a matter of class and ethnicity...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...47 WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Jeffrey Gros demonstrates his claim that the revolution in the church's ecumenical posture and the postconciliar progress toward church unity are nothing short of "amazing" and "marvelous...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...rather, they manifest and express the fullness of God's unchanging, "completely altruistic, all-consuming, and perfect love for his creatures...
...Displacing the suffering of God from the incarnate person of the Son to the divine nature seems to make that suffering more uniformly accessible since it elides a belief in Christ or connection to the church, Christ's body...
...Its actual scope is narrower: not the whole church in the whole world, but Roman Catholicism in the United States over the past hundred years...
...Catholics have lost the sense of social and cultural solidarity that marks their authentic tradition...
...D 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...He described an improvisational urban style that concealed a sophisticated intelligence behind a "regular guy" demeanor...
...The Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century Renewing and Reimaging the City of God John Deedy, editor TheLiturgical Press, $24,95,244 pp...
...McGuire's Warriors won...
...Though I knew him only from the sports pages and from television, his death moved me unexpectedly...
...He painlessly assimilated the new basketball forms developed by African American players on city playgrounds where Irish and Italian Catholics used to play...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...What might have been learned...
...Although we are far too close to the twentieth century for any definitive assessment (as Deedy, a former managing editor of Commonweal, acknowledges), it is never too early for attention to the main questions it asks: "What took place...
...The Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of the Word of God are God's answer to the problem of evil, and so a properly precise portrayal of the Incarnation—not the attribution of suffering to the divine nature—is the appropriate Christian defense against the charge that God is an eternal bystander...
...Weinandy is at his best in his discussion of the classical notion of the "exchange of properties" (comtnunicatio idiomatum), that is, the predicating of divine and human attributes to one and the same person, the Son incarnate...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Weinandy further claims that if, to the contrary, God's sorrow and grief were expressions of suffering in God, their reality would be diminished, not increased...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...It was easy to accede...
...Otherwise, claims that Christians, through baptism, experience "the true spiritual circumcision," and that Christians differ from non-Christians "not simply in degree but in kind" will confirm the fears of anyone espousing the passibility of divine nature...
...Thomas Weinandy certainly agrees that a God impervious to human suffering is not worthy of respect...
...I'm also tempted to say that two of my great loves, American Catholicism and basketball, dwelt together naturally in McGuire...
...It's a mortal sin not to live up to your capabilities," he told his black and white players alike...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...Each study stands alone, even though each is part of the same story...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...While he celebrates the pioneers (Merder, Wattson, Willebrands) who laid the groundwork for Vatican II's breakthrough, he also underscores the Catholic church's still unmet special responsibilities in the quest for the full, visible unity of the Body of Christ...
...This reminded me of a remark I once heard about a Saint Rocco's festival in an Italian neighborhood in New England...
...Jeanne Knoerle's survey of Catholic education overlooks none of the questions and complications that make up its history from the mid-nineteenth century to Ex corde ecclesiae (and the problems posed by the mandatum for theologians...
...Weinandy comments, "Strange as it may seem, but not paradoxically, one must maintain the unchangeable impassibility of the Son of God as God in order to guarantee that it is actually the divine Son of God, one in being with the Father, who truly suffers as man, that is, that it is truly God who knows now from experience what human suffering is...
...Two years ago, I asked a sports sociologist about the fact that all four coaches in the Final Four that year were Catholics...
...Only a thorough renewal of "the church's sense of mission and purpose" will win the next generation's loyalty...
...Disclosure statement: the latter John is a colleague and good friend of mine...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
