The call to holiness
Callahan, Sidney
SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be...
...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...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...The primary function of religion is not to generate happiness but to construct meaning" (see, Tyron Inbody, The Transforming God [Westminster John Knox...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...How many times have I heard cradle Catholics say that they left the church because they never understood that their religion was more than a formal ritual, or dutiful conformity to rules...
...Today, the pastoral priority of every Catholic parish should be to prepare its members to respond to the Second Vatican Council's "universal call to holiness...
...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...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...9 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...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...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...A universal education in the art of prayer must be initiated, centered on all the different forms of public and private prayer such as eucharistic prayer, liturgical prayer of the hours, contemplative prayer, and personal conversational communion with Jesus as friend...
...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...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...Yes, parishes do well to act as "mediating institutions" (the buzz word in political analysis used to praise voluntary associations that stand between the individual and the state...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...These sad testimonies always begin with the words, "I had twelve years of Catholic education, but...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be planned...
...Can, for instance, holiness also be unplanned...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...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...
...As a convert, I resist these stories, but over the years I've had to admit that abuses do happen...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...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...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...The pope accepts all this and says that working for social justice embodies the church's "commitment to history," and demonstrates our "love for our brothers and sisters...
...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...
...Overburdened pastors coping with the multiple activities of a busy parish may quail before this papal insistence that they reclaim the church's holy mystery and offer a training in holiness...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Holiness is also wholeness, or an integration of all that I am—and I am many things...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...In such a dialogue I think the pope makes the better case...
...God will hear you...
...Gospel joy leads to sacrificial love in action, but social action and meaningful constructs, sans prayer, don't lead to the abundant life...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...I tentatively conclude that prayer can be offered before and after intense, engaged activities, but not during...
...No, dear friend, it is a far greater misunderstanding to think that a coherent belief system is enough...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...The parish is "a diverse complex 8 reality" forced to provide "something for everybody...
...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...
...Such misunderstandings fuel the "I am a recovering Catholic" movement...
...The implicit message here is that mysticism for the masses is hopeless...
...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...
...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...
...Furthering the transcendent spiritual life of a parish is, as Mary rather than Martha would understand, to choose the better part...
...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...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...Holiness will always consist of intense love of God and neighbor, but the specifics can present problems...
...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...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...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...
...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...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...I cannot be concentrating on reciting lauds and compline at church, or on private prayers at home, and at the same time fully attend to my granddaughter's emotional needs—or talk over some thorny bioethical question with my husband...
...His point is that growth in holiness and prayer will energize love of neighbor and enkindle the commitment to social justice...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Maybe I will...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...John Paul II, however, rarely asks questions without his reply at the ready...
...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...
...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...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...REV...
...Just as sex does, I might add for the benefit of celibates and the cloistered...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Heart speaks to heart...
...As one good pastor puts it, his parish has to make an effort just "to reach out, to invite, to encourage people to the active practice of their faith at the most elementary level...
...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...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...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...
...I agree...
...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...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...REV...
...Well might he ask—given the complexity of the idea of holiness...
...I would love to hear a sermon helping me become whole and holy at every level of personal consciousness, with or without self-awareness...
...Since "paths to holiness are personal," as the pope writes, holiness comes in many forms...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...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...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Familial and intellectual activities conflict (the working grandmother problem), and both require a loss of self-consciousness in service of the other...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...Here I wish John Paul II had probed more deeply into the meaning of holiness for lay persons engaged in the world...
...As a wife, mother, grandmother, writer, and lecturer, my days consist of many activities that require my full focused attention...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...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...
...As the book of Nehemiah (8:10) says: "rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength...
...The pope is far truer to the gospel when he says that prayer and worship lead to "ineffable joy...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...And those parishes which are true to Catholic social teaching will serve the needy (with or without President George W. Bush's imprimatur), while they work for structural reforms...
...For that matter, holiness always attracts crowds...
...I disagree with those theological authorities (often Protestant) who proclaim that it is a deep-seated misunderstanding of religion "to presume that the purpose of religion is to produce happiness...
...When Catholics return to the faith, they do so because they discover the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and help them live good and happy lives...
...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...
...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...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...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...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...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...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...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...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...The holiness quest of a person in the world has to be grounded in the realization that working well and loving well require engrossed states of emotional and mental concentration...
...Yes, he answers, there exists a "genuine 'training in holiness' adapted to people's needs...
...The inner spiritual dimension of the faith was not apparent to them, only the judgments and guilt that produced the fear that cast out love...
...God offers the gift of holiness to all, but "the gift in turn becomes a task which must shape the whole of Christian life...
...Most registered Catholics aren't even coming to Mass every Sunday...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Churches do build community bonds that strengthen civil society...
...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...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...I'm obviously seeking a spirituality that covers the out-ofcontrol, unexamined passionate part of life...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Marvin, S.D...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
