High Church

...With grave respect, Albacete cites Wiesel's response: "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever...

...Sinai...

...In the face of the cold, inhuman horror men inflict on each other, which God permits, we must begin with a decent silence—or join in "cursing this face of the Infinite...

...But Albacete is a perfectly orthodox Catholic: He is the theological director of Communion and Liberation, an Italian-founded "lay movement" that appeals to artsy, high-strung Catholics...

...Imagine if Woody Allen's movies depicted Irish-Americans struggling with chastity and just-war theory while juggling day jobs and revising their screenplays—such people exist, and C & L helps keep them sane...

...Beginning with an easy humor and a well-affected worldliness, Albacete swiftly moves into deeper waters, taking seriously the difficulties that postmodern man encounters on the road to Mt...

...That men kill innocent victims every day—even in the name of God— raises for Albacete the mystery of suffering, of why a good, omnipotent God permits so much outrageous, crushing misery to afflict His creatures on earth...

...Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust...

...4) the scandal of suffering...

...Analyzing the moral short-circuit that transforms supernatural belief into murderous fanaticism, Albacete argues that the war against terrorism is not a battle between faith and secularism, or between peace-loving and warlike creeds, but rather a crisis within the religious instinct itself— a "conflict between religion open to the infinite Mystery and religion that has created idols, substitutes for the Mystery, for which sacrifices are readily made...

...Albacete shares Singer's passion for rationality...

...He appears as a "religion commentator" in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and on television with Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers—venues where one has come to expect dissident theologians, burnt-out nuns, and unfrocked priests who've found peace with Marx or Buddha...

...disarming titles such as "Of memes and genes" and "The real beer," Albacete tackles the four basic objections he discerns at the heart of contemporary resistance to faith: (1) the perception that science demands a rejection of religious belief...

...He points to "the hope of the same heart that causes me still to protest" as evidence that there is indeed something more...

...As a scientist himself, Albacete starts with a sympathetic look at the attempts of several science theorists to address, dismiss, or explore the ultimate questions raised by religious inquiry...

...Since God at the Ritz aims simply at being a foreword to faith, and not an apologia, Albacete touches lightly on that most controversial area, sexual ethics...

...By mystery, Albacete does not mean what is not yet known, or simply puzzling, but rather those aspects of life that are impermeable to the discursive reason that is so blazingly useful for the theoretical understanding and technological mastery of the material universe...

...Citing the work of the Jewish phe-nomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, Albacete suggests that this hope must lead men to "co-suffer" willingly with each other, to join as best they can in the grief and travails of their fellow men—and to imagine that God Himself is not unmoved and distant, mechanistic or cruel, but rather that He, too, co-suffers with Job...

...3) the dangers of fundamentalism...

...Reading Seymour Jonathan Singer's The Splendid Feast of Reason, Albacete notes respectfully the scientist's attempt, at age sixty, to move from explanations of human biology to an exploration of the human condition...

...Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself...

...Albacete mourns the easy willingness of so many moderns to reduce their desire, truncating the part of their souls that craves ultimate meaning for the sake of a transitory contentment...

...As such, he suggests, sexuality ought never to be treated as purely instrumental, or transformed by the icy touch of technology into merely a mode of producing pleasant experiences...

...In just five pages, he attempts to introduce readers to the phenomenology of Otherness, to present the sexual encounter—and even the sexually interested gaze—as a microcosm of one's encounter with the radically Other, with God...

...A true dialogue between the West and the Islamic world should be based on this common origin and its implications...

...It is only by reaching beyond the self-enclosed world of observable, testable phenomena, into the realm of meaning and mystery, that one may begin to understand the human heart, including the scientist's...

...Singer chooses to follow a "lustrous vein of gold, shining forth from an otherwise dismal human landscape . . . that marvelous and uniquely human virtue, rationality and [its] most significant offspring, modern Western science...

...Albacete summons the image of a boy trained in the Torah, in the unceasing reflection on and praise of a provident, loving God, shipped off by a genocidal bureaucracy to a concentration camp...

...He contrasts the knowledge a pathologist might have of the human body with the knowledge she has of her husband's body in the act of love...

...2) the seeming arbitrariness of traditional sexual ethics...

...In God at the Ritz, Albacete has crafted a subtle, wry, and gentle book—a deeply personal investigation of the "ultimate questions" that vex contemporary Westerners, written very much in the spirit of Walker Percy, whom he reveres...

...In the realm of mystery, following Percy, Albacete includes both God and the Self...

...He gently deflates Singer's old-fashioned positivism, responding that "the religious impulse is born not of fear but of desire...

...Rather, he compares the sexual moment to Rilke's famous encounter with the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," a meeting with the stark face of another infinity, another Self, which demands: "You must change your life...

...A big, jowly smoker, a trained physicist and moral theologian, Monty Python aficionado and confidante of Cardinal Ratzinger, Albacete comes across in person and print like Erasmus of Rotterdam, as revised by Rabelais...

...In response, he suggests, we should not fall into the error of constructing our own idol and calling it "Western Civilization...

...BY JOHN ZMIRAK Maybe you haven't heard of him, since he spends most of his considerable talent reaching out to liberals, but Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete is a unique figure in American Catholicism...

...To his credit, Albacete poses this question as starkly as possible, pointing to the very hardest cases, such as the spiritual and physical torment endured by the young Elie Wiesel, recalled in his searing memoir Night...

...And yet," Albacete continues, "there is something else in my heart that will also not go away—the certainty that this anger cannot be, and cannot be allowed to be, the last word about human life...

...Singer suppresses the questions raised by existential matters, attributing "the origins of religion to ignorance about the relation between particular causes and their effects, which give rise to fear of the unknown," as Albacete recounts with an almost audible sigh...

...Unwilling to imitate the so-called "friends" of Job, Albacete doesn't presume to answer...

...Instead, as a civilization, ours is one that has originated exactly where Islam did, namely within a religious experience of Mystery associated with a historical event called "the election of Abraham...

...In short chapters that read like extended pensées, with John Zmirak is the author of Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist (ISI Books...

...Is one of these types of knowledge false or trivial...

...As a resident of Yonkers, New York, Albacete had ample opportunity to witness the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and consider its implications for faith...

...Yet when Singer comes across religious questions, Albacete notes, the scientist seems to slam shut his mind and drop the stance of open inquiry that makes knowledge possible—or even attractive...

...For this reason, personal commitments, feelings, passions, emotions, and concerns are components of the religious experience because they are an inescapable and essential part of human desire...

...In fact, as he demonstrates from Singer's own work and that of several eminent scientific writers, the very motives that drive them to pursue the noble path of science—the love of truth, the desire to share it with others—elude their reductionist theories...

...To denigrate either mode of knowing, for Albacete, means lapsing into self-willed blindness, a blinkered and incomplete view of life...

...Never...