Germany: Liberal Theologians = Dying Church

From InsideCatholic.com:

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpa as “presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to” and then offered classic examples of chutzpa in action: “Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. A chutzpanik may be defined as the man who shouts ‘Help! Help!’ while beating you up.”

Leo Rosten should have lived to experience German Catholic theologians of the early 21st century.

In anticipation of Pope Benedict XVI’s forthcoming visit to his homeland, more than 200 German theologians -- men and women who have earned doctoral degrees in theology and teach in German universities -- have issued a manifesto, “The Church in 2011: A Necessary Departure.” The manifesto itself does not identify the destination for which the Church is to depart, but the terminus ad quem seems reasonably clear from a careful reading of the document: Catholicism is to transform itself into another liberal Protestant sect by conceding virtually every point at issue between classic Christianity and the ambient culture of the postmodern West.

It is, perhaps, no surprise to find German Catholic theologians publicly supporting the ordination of married men and women to the ministerial priesthood (overtly), same-sex “marriage” (slyly), and full communion within the Church for those in irregular marriages (subtly but unmistakably). These causes have been espoused for years. German theologians dissented en masse from the 1993 teaching of Veritatis Splendor on the nature of moral acts and from the 1994 teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the Church’s inability to admit women to Holy Orders. What was particularly striking about this new manifesto was its attempt to address serious problems with tried-and-failed solutions. That bespeaks a remarkable lack of intellectual creativity and historical sense.

Thus we are told that the German sexual abuse cases that came to light in 2010 have “plunged the Catholic Church in Germany into an unequaled crisis.” Really? I understand, and in many respects sympathize with, German complaints about the ubiquity of references to the National Socialist period whenever anything German is discussed. But was 2010 really a crisis greater than that in which German Catholicism found itself between Hitler’s 1933 accession to power and Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945? (Do today’s Catholics face crises of conscience greater than those faced by Count Claus von Stauffenberg or Sophie Scholl?) Moreover, what about the crisis of faith that emptied German churches over the past two generations, such that weekly Mass attendance in urban areas hovers around 5-10 percent?

The manifesto is also notable for its failure to examine academic consciences, an exercise that might have led to more measured assessments of responsibility for the current situation. Do these theologians imagine that they and their teachers bear no responsibility for the “paralysis and resignation” they deplore in German Catholicism? Does German theology’s tendency to treat the Bible as a specimen to be dissected rather than a gift to be studied with a full array of interpretive tools (including the eyes of faith) have nothing to do with today’s crisis of faith in a land whose very language was formed by Luther’s biblical translation? Has the theologians’ bizarre notion that “freedom of conscience” means abject surrender to the sexual revolution in all its demands had nothing to do with the Church’s failures to convert a hedonistic culture?

Few of these academics have any serious or sustained connection to the liturgical or pastoral life of the Church; yet they assume they occupy a privileged position from which to understand what has happened to German Catholicism and how its genuine problems can best be addressed. Why?

Seeking a rousing conclusion to their call to the ecclesiastical barricades, the German theologians advise their fellow Catholics that they should “look to the future with courage and walk on water, like Peter as Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you have fear? Is your faith so weak?’” A question to the professors: Would each of you who believes that Peter walked on water please raise your hand?

There is nothing particularly Catholic about any of this. Rather, it’s what we call the“established church syndrome,” and it most certainly applies to “Mainstream Protestantism” in the United States (which is no longer mainstream).

Relgious organizations that take for granted that a fair number of people will come through the doors (either out of habit, or because they have no choice) lose missionary zeal. They become places where people wanting a cozy sinecure go for a career.

They crave “mainstream” acceptance, which means they shy away from (and soon enough, actively oppose) ideas of which the secular media and secular academia disapprove, such as belief in miracles or Christian views on sexual morality.

Catholicism, of course, is heterogeneous, and parts of the Church have avoided this curse — the campus ministries at Texas A & M and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for example.

And some parts of the world are producing large numbers of men and women going into religious vocations, a phenomenon that seems to have coincided with the tenure of John Paul II as Pope.

Marquette, unfortunately, resembles Germany more than places where Catholicism thrives. It’s not the fault of the Theology Department, which is reasonably faithful. It’s more the fault of a politically correct Campus Ministry, campus bureaucrats and a heavily secular faculty.

And the fact that students come here socialized more by the mass media than by the Church (and indeed, only a minority of freshmen will now call themselves Catholic) doesn’t help either.

Indoctrination in a Marquette Theology Class

A student of ours provided this e-mail, sent out by an unnamed professor in a Theology Class the student is taking.

The e-mail above bears a strong resemblance to a recent essay by leftist Theology Prof. Daniel Maguire. Maguire has confirmed to us that he sent the message to students.

Thursday, February 17, 2011 6:30 PM

This fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.

The Ed Schulz Show on MSNBC, Channel 46 is on at 9:00 pm broadcasting from Madison. I’m not assigning that but you might find it of interest.

************************************************

Neoliberalism (neoconservatism) is the operating system in the political economy of the Right.

It has these characteristics:

1) “Possessive individualism.” Greedy individualism would describe it better. It embodies the Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest—mentality. It is “Greed is good” theory.

(2) It is anti-government, wanting to minimize the role of the government, and remove regulations. Therefore it stresses “privatization,” taking things out of government hands and giving it to private business. Following the neoliberal script, George W. Bush tried to “privatize” Social Security, handing over retirement benefits to the mercy of the stock market. Water supply has in some places been privatized; airports and roads have been targeted for privatizing.

(3) Neoliberalism is anti-unions. Reagan went after the air traffic controllers union. Governor Walker is going after public worker’s union--teachers, etc.-- denying them the right to collective bargaining.

(4) Neoliberalism asks us to put our trust in the market and in corporations and to allow them to have unfettered freedom.

In England, Maggie Thatcher was an apostle of Neoliberalism. The results were clear: wealth was shifted from the bottom to the top. When she entered office one in ten Britons were listed as below the poverty line. When she finished one in four were in poverty and one in three children.

Ronald Reagan was another devotee of Neoliberalism. As Kevin Phillips, a Republican analysys [sic] and former aide to President Nixon reported in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor: in the 1980s the top 10 percent of American families increased their average family income by 16 percent, the top 5 percent by 23 percent, and the top one percent by 50 percent. The bottom 80 percent of families and workers all lost something and the lower they were on the scale, the more they lost. The bottom 10% lost 15% of their already meager incomes.

Neoliberalism lacks a sense of social justice. It is basically opposed to sharing. Therefore it is wildly opposed to taxes regardless of what taxes do for the common good. It particularly opposes taxes for the wealthy. The billionaire Warren Buffett pays 17%; his secretary pays 30%. It is the opposite of Jesus’ “Blessed are the poor;” it is “Blessed are the rich.”

Remember Aristotle said “Justice holds the city together.” and Thomas Aquinas said “Justice consists in sharing.”

Neoliberalism is basically opposed to justice. It naturally opposes government since government enforces sharing, e.g. in taxes and in curbing monopolies.

The current demonstrations in Madison are in effect protesting neoliberalism.

As is typical with leftist professors, especially those in disciplines far removed from empirical social reality, this message is absurdly ignorant of the facts. For example, during the evil neo-liberal Reagan Administration, the mean income of the poorest 20% of the population increased. It was $10,682 in constant 2009 dollars in 1980, and $11,681 in the same constant dollars in 1989. Of course, the income of the top earners increased faster. But does “social justice” mean that we should envy and want to hurt affluent people?

Poverty rates in the U.K. are misleading, since they are usually measured as the percentage of people below (say) 40% or 50% of the median income. That way if everybody gets equally better off, poverty fails to decline. And if most of society gets better off, and low income groups remain equally well-off, poverty “increases” (notwithstanding that the poor are no worse off).

So this kind of data is perfect for people who want to play games with statistics.

Neo-liberalism

Of course, neo-liberal policies have been all the rage in recent years, and not just in the capitalist USA. European socialist countries have slashed top tax rates, and privatized nationalized industries. And they have done that not because greed has triumphed, but because socialist policies don’t work.

The opposite of neo-liberalism, in fact, is not compassion or social justice, it’s statism.

Indoctrination

All professors, us included, have their biases, and students can usually figure out what they are. But the majority allow views on both sides to be presented, and don’t push one side of contemporary political conflict.

We, for example, have not said a single word to our classes either in support of or opposition to the union protests in Madison.

But this professor tells students that this e-mail “fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.” Students, apparently, are supposed to write about the evil of greedy neo-liberalism and how social justice demands that they side with union demands.

It would require a very gutsy student to take a different view in this class.

Fr. Bryan Massingale: Politically Correct Race Hustler

From Daniel Suhr of GOP3.COM, a thorough deconstruction of a fellow who appears to be Dan Maguire’s successor as the high-profile leftist in Marquette’s Theology Department.

It has been reported to me that during his homily celebrating the opening of Mission Week, Fr. Bryan Massingale, associate professor of theology, said that when you fight for justice, “People may write about you on blogs, or call you liberal or politically correct.”

But as Shur makes quite clear, Massingale is liberal (or leftist) and is politically correct.

Anybody who wants to dispute that might find any statement of his that contradicts the standard orthodoxy of secular liberals.

A key element of Massingale’s rhetoric is the idea of “white privilege:” the idea that if you are white you have it better than most black people, and should feel guilty about that.

Well, you do have it better and you should not feel guilty about that.

If black people are worse off on average than white people, the causes are complex, but blathering about “white privilege” gets you nowhere in understanding them.

Black people, for example, are worse off because they are much more likely to have been born out of wedlock, or to have grown up in a single parent family. Is it the fault of white people that black guys knock up black girls and women and then run off? The hard core politically correct types say “yes,” but that’s because they hold the idea, profoundly demeaning to black people, that the latter can’t be expected to make moral decisions.

The generation of black people that marched with Martin Luther King was able to make moral decisions. Today’s generation could too, but are less likely to if people like Massingale tell them they are not expected to.

Black people are much more likely to be victimized by crime than whites. But it’s not Klansmen doing the victimizing. It’s other blacks. Again, trying to blame whites is not convincing.

Where whites are to blame, they are mostly long dead. Of course, in the world of the politically correct, just being white taints one with the sins of the slaveowners. But this is no better than the old racist canard that blacks bear the Mark of Cain.

For the politically correct, it doesn’t matter if an ancestor of yours died fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. You are still tainted.

The blather about white privilege is simply a strategy for manipulating people. As Massingale put it: “The reality of one’s white privilege does not make him or her an evil individual; what a person does with that privilege is the acid-test of his or her personal morality.” Translation: adopt our political agenda, or you are an evil person.

A common theme among the victim mongers is the notion that whites are well off because they exploited blacks. As Massingale’s document asks rhetorically: “‘Why should I give up a social status that benefits me?’ We answer: ‘Because the privileges of some are obtained at the expense of others.’”

This, quite simply, is nonsense.

If it were true the South, where slavery was widespread after it had withered away in the North, would have been richer and more prosperous than the North. In fact, the South ended the Civil War poor and remained crushingly poor up until only a couple of generations ago. While the slave owners may have benefited the region did not.

Slavery and segregation did not make whites any better off, with the arguable exception of the slave owners. Probably the people who benefited most were slave traders.

But a lot of those were blacks in Africa.

In the narrow little zero-sum world of the politically correct, nobody gets better off unless they make somebody worse off. This belief is why they tend to be socialists. John Paul the Great, in Centesimus Annus, preached the gospel of economic growth, opportunity, entrepreneurship and free markets. Clerical leftists like Massingale essentially blew this off, and continued to take their cues from secular leftists.

Fr. Simon Harak: Anti-War Leftist Takes Money From War Profiteers

Simon Harak, Lecturer in Theology at Marquette, is a leftist who came to Marquette last year to head a “Center for Peacemaking.”

Harak’s extreme political views have been exposed by GOP3.COM, as well as right here on the Marquette Warrior.

Harak specializes in rhetoric about the evils of “War Profiteers” and his motto appears to be “Stop the Merchants of Death.”

But in a splendid piece of investigative reporting, Daniel Suhr of GOP3.COM has discovered that Harak appears to be a beneficiary of the Merchants of Death.

Specifically, the Sally and Terry Rynne Foundation, which is funding the Center for Peacemaking, has large investments in defense contractors. As Suhr points out:

Honeywell is listed as one of the fifteen largest defense contractors in the nation, doing $4.2 billion in US defense contractors in 2004. 3M does a fair amount of defense contracting as well. Shell was once a top 50 defense contractor. Microsoft, not surprisingly, does some defense business, as does Chevron. Exxon Mobil and BP Amaco are top 50 defense contractors. Bell South and Wells Fargo are on the Army Pays list, which the “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign identified as a way for non-military contractor corporations to support war and violence.

Suhr could have added Du Pont, historically one of the great “Merchants of Death” but fallen to 87th place in a 2001 listing.

Suhr draws the logical conclusion from all this.

Given that Fr. Harak has defined the last several years of his life in opposition to the corporations that profit on war, I think the only way he can maintain any measure of integrity and intellectual consistency is to refuse the gift from the Rynne Foundation. If he allows Marquette to keep the gift, he would, arguably, be making Marquette complicit in this nasty business of war profiteering.

It seems that Harak and his cohort Michael Duffey are in a tough spot. It’s easy to be self-righteous if you are criticizing the way other people get their money.

Just how serious are they in their claims that profits from defense contractors are immoral?

Conservative Student Leaflets Class of Leftist Theology Instructor

From GOP3.COM, a post by Brian Collar:

To the students of Theo 001, Section 1021 (along with our regular readers):

Thanks for visiting GOP3.com based on the information sheet given to you this morning before you entered your classroom.

If you would like another copy of the “Best of” list of Simon Harak’s zany quotes, compiled by myself and co-blogger Daniel Suhr, download this PDF document and print it out. Also, we encourage all of our regular readers to review some of Harak’s outrageous remarks.

Read the rest for more details of Harak’s extreme leftist views.

We asked Collar about the reaction to his leafleting. He responded:

Students were pretty miffed, as I knew they would be. One liberal kid got all huffy about the fact that I was handing them out (“How would you know this stuff if you haven’t had his class” etc). I then said that I was warning the class before they had to hear misrepresentations of the Catholic faith and accusations that American forces in Iraq had indiscriminately killed millions.

Then the kid retorted that we had caused any number of atrocities in Iraq. To which, beautifully, this other freshman, who I assume is here on the GI Bill, became angry and said, “I’ve been to Iraq, that’s not true. I’ve been in the military for six years.” The girl couldn’t have been more than 5’1”, it was awesome! She went on for a couple more seconds.

Harak didn’t show up until a few minutes before his class. I went up to him and gave it to him. “A little bit of activism,” I managed to get out. He looked at me, looked at the document, and said “Well isn’t this interesting” and then walked into the classroom. I stayed around for maybe 2-3 more minutes handing them out to students as they entered the hallway to go to his class.

I ended up handing out about 30, and there were 38 students in the class according to Checkmarq.

Remarkably, even though it was nearly 3 hours ago, I haven’t had a single email response on the blog or in my personal email, and no one has called me.

We’ve never heard of this happening before at Marquette.

It has to be pointed out, however, that leftist campus activists on many campuses in the 60s not only did things like this, they actually disrupted the classes of professors whose views they disagreed with.

So we’ll see how people at Marquette react to this.

Collar ends his post with an appeal to Marquette students to drop Harak’s class.

But fortunately, you at least do not need to subsidize Harak with your own time. You still have the opportunity to switch out of Harak’s Theo 001 course and into another course. Call up the College of Arts and Sciences at 288-7059 and ask to get into another Theo 001 class — they can get you in, even if another class is full. Or change to another class required by the Core Curriculum.

Is this appeal going to work? Almost certainly not. Marquette students don’t particularly mind controversial professors. Conservative students, who might be inclined to drop Harak, are probably even more tolerant than liberal students in this regard.

In fact, the publicity is likely to increase Harak’s enrollment, if it has any effect at all.

Is this a violation of Harak’s “academic freedom?”

When Students for Academic Freedom tried to organize on the Marquette campus last year, the Administration shut them down on the grounds that they might criticize the liberal and leftist bias of professors and programs. So Marquette’s position was that “academic freedom” does not include the right of students to criticize professors for bias.

But of course, students are perfectly free to criticize professors for bias at places like RateMyProfessors.com and the now defunct DogEars.

Campus leftists, for their part, were quite happy to picket and leaflet when the Law School brought Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to Marquette to speak.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the campus left claimed that “academic freedom” applies to professors, but not to students and not to outside speakers. In other words, it only applies to the most liberal and leftist group that might want to express themselves on a college campus.

[Update:]

Harak declined to respond to our request for an “on the record” comment about this issue.

Campus Discussion of Vagina Monologues: Conservatives Fail to Step Up

This past Saturday saw the campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” presented under the aegis of the Honors Program. There is plenty wrong with the play, as we have explained right here.

But one of the most comprehensive and eloquent explanations of the moral defects of the play was written by five undergraduates in a Tribune op-ed.

It said, in part:

“The Vagina Monologues” contains many problematic elements. It glorifies practices which are regarded as immoral by many Christians and non-Christians alike.

It provides no positive male characterizations and lacks any examples of healthy intimacy.

It lacks any representation of a Christian view of sexuality, though the author claims to have interviewed hundreds of women. Rather than viewing the body and sexual organs with respect, it draws on every possible vulgar reference.

From a standpoint of sexual violence awareness, the play has little to offer victims of violence or those who care for them.

True, it describes accounts of exploitation and rape in graphic terms, but the author freely admits that many of these accounts are purely imaginary and improvised.

By reducing them to a single body part - the vagina - the play objectifies and dehumanizes women while ignoring the qualities of intellect, morality, creativity and leadership which women have worked so long to have recognized by society.

With a wealth of other materials at its fingertips which would promote an educated discourse, why did the university choose this particular work?

That’s a good question, and the answer is doubtless that lefty feminists (and their liberal allies) want to perform it precisely because Christian conservatives don’t like it.

There is really little other justification.

But what is wrong with performing it on campus as a point of discussion? In principle, nothing.

But if the purpose is to promote discussion, it’s fair to evaluate the quality of that discussion. Going in, there were plenty of reasons to suspect that it would be stacked with one-note feminists who would care little for Christian views of sexuality.

The Tribune, back in early April, noted the one-sidedness of the panel slated to discuss the play, observed:

. . . with just more than two weeks left until the April 14 performance, there is no Catholic representative yet. Alongside three faculty members from political science, philosophy and English, the panel includes Rosalind Hinton, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University, according to a flier for the event.

Hinton’s specialties, according to the DePaul Web site, include African American religions and gender in American religious contexts. A survey of her writings reveals little, if any, handling of Catholic issues. While it sounds like she would add perspective to this panel, there remains no faculty member, such as a priest or Catholic theologian, to represent Catholic teaching.

As we wrote in January, “if the reading is in opposition to a healthy view of female sexuality, why is this? If it is empowering, how do we understand this vision in terms of our Catholic faith?” We need to adequately represent all perspectives to answer these questions properly.

We asked Anthony Peressini, Co-Director of the Honors Program and organizer of the event, to respond to the Tribune’s criticism. He replied as follows:

The panel includes well-qualified individuals who will lead a dialogue that addresses multiple perspectives, both faith-based and academic, of the issues presented in the reading. I am not comfortable assigning “left leaning” or other labels to these individuals in this setting.

Until we hear their presentations tomorrow, I could not pre-judge or classify their opinions of the play. As I said, our goal is to present a variety of perspectives that enable a multi-faceted analysis of the issues presented in the reading. I expect our panel will do just that.

Did it happen that way?

Mostly not.

The bright spot of the evening was feminist English professor Heather Hathaway, who introduced the work. Far from providing a sycophantic view of the piece, she criticized it for (among other things) not being well written, for not being contextualized or self reflective, for being incoherent (such that sometimes we don’t actually know what it is saying), for reducing women to their genitalia and for being western and bourgeois (obsessed with the concerns of affluent feminists in rich countries as opposed to poor women in the third world).

In spite of several positive comments that she made, some of the leftists in attendance were unhappy with this.

And some conservative students were unhappy because she failed to discuss the moral stance of the play concerning human sexuality.

So who was supposed to discuss that latter issue? Who was supposed to analyze the play from a Catholic perspective? A certain Rosalind Hinton, who is an Assistant Professor of Religious studies at DePaul University. Well before the performance, blogger Daniel Suhr had no trouble establishing that Hinton is a leftist of the same stripe as Daniel Maguire.

So her performance was not surprising. She began as follows:

I’m supposed to give a Catholic viewpoint… (Short pause marked by sarcastic grin.) the Catholic Viewpoint. (Visibly rolls eyes.)

The substance of her talk wasn’t any better. According to blogger Katie Wycklendt:

She went to discuss her conviction that the acceptability of masturbation shouldn’t even be disputed [as well as asserting] her theory on the legitimacy of dispute over the Church’s stance on homosexuality, contraception, and consensual, responsible premarital sex. She asserted that Church authorities are merely trying to control people’s lives and that there is a context for every truth (a good way of getting around [explicitly] endorsing relative truth).

In other words, the speaker who was supposed to represent the Catholic perspective actually attacked the Catholic perspective!

And the issue here wasn’t whether the Catholic perspective should be the only view presented, or even whether it should be one among alternative views presented, but whether it should be represented at all.

So is this just another example of standard political correctness? Did the Honors Program (basically an adjunct of the very politically correct English and Philosophy departments) let all its biases hang out here?

In fact, the story is more complicated.

Peressini in fact expended a lot of effort trying to get a conservative speaker who would uphold the Church’s teaching. He contacted at least eight (and perhaps ten to twelve) people, all of whom turned him down. And he called the Chair of the Theology Department (which is not nearly so leftist and politically correct as English and Philosophy) to get leads on possible speakers.

Peressini appears to have shot himself in the foot by limiting his search to people with academic credentials. A well-informed and eloquent student like Suhr would have done very well.

But the most disturbing thing about this is that several fairly orthodox and conservative Catholic scholars failed to step up and defend the Church’s position. Somebody who doesn’t know better might assume that the Church’s position can’t be defended. That’s not true, but neither is it going to prevail if people won’t defend it.

Hard Leftist on Theology Faculty

Daniel Surh at GOP3.COM first recognized the significance of a bland blurb in the Marquette Tribune saying that Father Simon Harak, S.J., is now a Lecturer in the Marquette Theology Department.

GOP3 blogger Brian Collar just put us onto Harak’s blog, at the address http://www.nowarforprofit.blogspot.com/.

The current edition no longer shows his name, but the electronic trail is clear. Here is the user profile that used to point to Harak and a blog called “Stop the Merchants of Death.” And here is a copy (from the Google cache) of that blog.

We reached Harak, who confirmed that, although he has left the War Resisters League, and thus isn’t listed on the profile, it’s still “his baby.”