Chairman's Blog

Before Mass, a wreath is laid at the tomb of Cardinal Heenan in grateful thanks for his role in helping to preserve the Traditional Mass in England and Wales.

Bishop John Arnold celebrating the Requiem in 2014

1. Given that Council documents and other official documents contain both statements of the Ordinary Magisterium and other kinds of proposition, such as historical and scientific claims (such as are not inseparably connected with teaching), prudential judgements, and theological speculations, would the loyal Catholic not need to apply his mind first to determining what was actually magisterial in a document before submitting intellect and will to it?

Anyone who thinks that the non-magisterial content of one official document cannot contradict that of another simply needs to read a few. The mutually-contradictory Papal Bulls of the Franciscan property debate would be one place to start.

2. When the meaning of putatively magisterial statements in Council or other official documents are disputed, and where such disputes are themselves legitimate, how is it possible to submit one's intellect and will to them? How can one submit one's intellect to a statement whose meaning one cannot determine?

What seems reasonably clear is that the top two officials of Opus Dei are inviting Catholics to adopt an attitude of pre-emptive intellectual submission towards anything emanating from Rome, without making use of the right - which can also be a duty - to inform our fellow Catholics of their concerns about such emanations. Yes, they say, there can be ambiguities and problems, but obedience of the intellect comes first, acceptance come first, and attempts to smooth over the problems can follow later.

I've been told in comments on this blog, what I already knew, which is that Opus Dei contains many Good People. Of course it does. These are, in fact, among the most good-hearted and faithful Catholics whom one could hope to meet. It is through no lack of charity towards them that I write as a I do: quite the contrary. While I know that what I write will have no effect at all on the leadership of the organisation, I want to warn those who are members, and those associated with the many other organisations which include what we call 'conservative' Catholics, of the dangers of the road you are going down, when you start thinking of obedience as the chief or even the only virtue, instead of humility, justice, courage, charity, and the virtue of faith itself.

One danger, which follows obviously from what I have just said, is a spiritual distortion arising from a failure to recognise and cultivate the full set of virtues. That is something readers will just have to meditate upon. I want to focus on two other dangers.

The first is that it leads into anti-intellectualism. Perhaps this doesn't look like a big deal, but it will destroy the intellectual prestige of your communities and drive out those of your members of an intellectual bent. People with an intellectual formation who are honest will not be able to stick it: it will drive them nuts.

The second problem derives from the fact that when the wind changes direction, the internal policy will follow also. This isn't some uncharitable speculation on my part, it is exactly what Mgr Ocariz is saying. A new Pope, a new policy, and a new document, and all the 'faithful Catholics' who follow his advice will be reading the 'innovation' back into previous documents, submitting their intellects, and tying themselves into knots to say that what they'd previously said was black is actually, now you come to look at it, white. You may think we'll have to wait for a new Pope to see this happening, but no, we can see it happening with the current Pope.

It is a fact, and not a particularly disturbing one in itself, that Papal policy changes. Again, anyone doubting this just needs to do some reading, but a nice example is the maddening succession of policy reversals the Popes made towards the 'Chinese Rites'. Now it may be that such changes of policy require obedience on the basis of the disciplinary authority of the Pope, but anyone living through a period such as that who tries to justify each policy as correct, as in continuity with previous rules, and as based on fundamental magisterial principles, because he does not want to admit that official documents should ever be disagreed with, has got a problem.

He has got, in fact, the problem that the British Communist Party had in and just before the the Second World War. First the Party Line was that the Nazis were evil, as they were persecuting communists in Germany. Then the Party Line was to be neutral in the war against Germany, since the Soviet Union was allied to the Nazis. And then the Party Line was to support the war with Germany, since the Soviet Union was at war with them itself. Each had to be passed off as eternally true for fundamental ideological reasons.

Although in France and Italy the Communists were able to retrieve some self-respect by their resistence to occupation, in Britain the flip-flopping did irreparable damage to the Party's credibility. The same thing is going to happen to any organisation which claims to base itself on objective principles which does repeated 'backflips', to use Cardinal Pell's phrase. To put it bluntly, this will destroy your community.

Am I applying this to Opus Dei? Let me correct that impression. Really, what I have been saying applies to the Catholic Church as a whole over the last half-century. We have all seen it: good-hearted and loyal people twisting themselves into pretzels to make everything seem ok, but other Catholic intellectuals just dropping out of the whole game because it looks incompatible with intellectual self-respect. And yet others, observing all this, concluding that the Church doesn't really stand for anything much any more.

That's a lesson we should learn from. If we don't, we are going to repeat it till we do.

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