Tom Shakely
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  • May 23, 2022

    Archbishop Cordileone and a public life ordered to reality

    On May 20th, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco publicly notified U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she is prohibited from Holy Communion in her home diocese until she repents and receives absolution for her promotion of abortion:

    A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others.  Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons “are not to be admitted to Holy Communion” (Code of Canon Law, can. 915). …

    I am grateful to you for the time you have given me in the past to speak about these matters.  Unfortunately, I have not received such an accommodation to my many requests to speak with you again since you vowed to codify the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in federal law following upon passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 last September.  That is why I communicated my concerns to you via letter on April 7, 2022, and informed you there that, should you not publically repudiate your advocacy for abortion “rights” or else refrain from referring to your Catholic faith in public and receiving Holy Communion, I would have no choice but to make a declaration, in keeping with canon 915, that you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.

    As you have not publically repudiated your position on abortion, and continue to refer to your Catholic faith in justifying your position and to receive Holy Communion, that time has now come.  Therefore, in light of my responsibility as the Archbishop of San Francisco to be “concerned for all the Christian faithful entrusted to [my] care” (Code of Canon Law, can. 383, §1), by means of this communication I am hereby notifying you that you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publically repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance.

    Please know that I stand ready to continue our conversation at any time, and will continue to offer up prayer and fasting for you.

    I also ask all of the faithful of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to pray for all of our legislators, especially Catholic legislators who promote procured abortion, that with the help and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they may undergo a conversion of heart in this most grave matter and human life may be protected and fostered in every stage and condition of life.

    Mary Eberstadt writes on this news within the context of that generation of Catholic politicians who believe that moral truth and sacramental reality are divorced from politics. Politics, which exists to order public life to the common good, necessarily involves the sorting out of truth claims—with one’s conclusion about the rightness or wrongness of abortion arguably the most obvious moral issue in contemporary political life:

    Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s pastoral letter, or notification, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she is barred from receiving Communion in the Archdiocese of San Francisco amounts to a depth charge beneath the surface of the Roman Catholic Church. It makes clear that the phrase “pro-abortion Catholic” is an oxymoron. Pressure will likely increase on Catholic bishops elsewhere to do what Cordileone has just accomplished: articulate what is indisputably church law. …

    First, any clarification of facts is its own virtue. The letter to Pelosi, alongside the archbishop’s accompanying letters to priests and the laity, calmly informs others what Catholicism actually teaches about some subjects. In an age when more and more people are unchurched, this is itself a public service. The letters say, in effect, The catechism professes this. The archbishop’s letter to the laity quotes this utter nonequivocation from Pope Francis: “Every child who, rather than being born, is condemned unjustly to being aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ.” Also clarified is another teaching worth reiterating at a time of rising secularization: Everyone sins, and there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin. But leading others to sin, repeatedly and impenitently, is uniquely grave. …

    Finally, the archbishop’s notification might mark the beginning of the end for another experiment run amok: the notion that Catholics can simultaneously rattle rosary beads in public while working overtime against bedrock teachings.

    Politics exists to promote, to safeguard, and to manifest realities. A politics that suggests an act like abortion is good will promote, safeguard, and manifest a culture that regards abortion as if it were good.

    A politics that is ordered to reality, however, will not be at war with the obvious good that is human life. A politics ordered to reality will not be ambivalent in uplifting and providing real choices to those most vulnerable to the predations of abortionists. A politics ordered to reality will, in its language, speak clearly rather than ambiguously about what is at stake.

    Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. writes, “Archbishop Cordileone is not politicising the Eucharist but Eucharisticising politics; for politicians too are subject to Christ’s law.”

  • May 16, 2022

    Where shall wisdom be found?

    President John Garvey of The Catholic University of America delivered his final commencement remarks this past weekend. He’s stepping down next month as president after 12 years and Peter Kilpatrick will assume the presidency. President Garvey spoke on wisdom:

    I was struck by President Garvey’s mentioning of Job 28. MaryKate and I chose this for the First Reading at our Wedding in September, specifically Job 28:12-15, 23-28:

    But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know the way to it, and it is not found in the land of the living. The deep says, “It is not in me,” and the sea says, “It is not with me.” It cannot be gotten for gold, and silver cannot be weighed as its price. … God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens. When he gave to the wind its weight, and meted out the waters by measure; when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder; then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out. And he said to man, “Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”

    Job comes to realize that despite his righteousness he nonetheless falls short of the glory of God, in what I read as a sort of foreshadowing of the necessity of God’s gratuitous grace for our hope of salvation. Job’s challenge to God amidst the ruins of his life, amidst his suffering and loss, is the pitiable challenge of “a faultfinder contend[ing] with the Almighty.” Job’s humility and repentance in the sight of God, the author and source of all life, all goodness, is the beginning of wisdom:

    Job answered the LORD: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

    Humility sets us on the path home to God, a radical path that requires the continual humbling of our powerful but frail ego in order to attain the happiness upon which no sun sets.

  • May 13, 2022

    The personal, relational character of education

    Jonathan Malesic writes from Dallas on his experience teaching in a (not quite) post-pandemic culture at Southern Methodist University, where his experiences of student disengagement are said to mirror those being experienced by professors nationally. Malesic compares that disengagement and general loss of momentum to the University of Dallas, which went remote only during the early weeks of the pandemic and which has been operating normally and in-person since the Fall 2020 semester:

    To the people I spoke with at the University of Dallas, the personal, relational character of education is inseparable from high intellectual standards. Ms. Capizzi recalled a literature course she took with a professor who was known as a hard grader. She visited his office at least once a week to talk about the material, and even more often when there was a paper due. “Him having a high standard for each of us was good, but then we have the standard for ourselves,” she said. “It’s difficult, but you want it to be difficult, and you want to be a part of it because it’s difficult.”

    Ms. Capizzi’s comments echo those of the sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, who in their 2014 book, “How College Works,” found that students learn when they’re motivated, and “the strongest motivation to work on basic skills comes from an emotionally based face-to-face relationship with specific other people — for instance, the one-on-one writing tutorial with a respected professor who cares about this student’s work.”

    Those relationships are much harder to forge remotely, and students who don’t discover early on that they learn through relationships will never know to seek them out. Even Mr. Vancil, who wishes he could take all his classes remotely, said he learns a great deal from his frequent visits to his professors’ office hours.

    Professors must recognize that caring for students means wanting to see them thrive. That entails high expectations and a willingness to help students exceed them. Administrators will need to enact policies that put relationships at the center. That will mean resisting the temptation to expand remote learning, even if students demand it, and ensuring that faculty workloads leave time for individual attention to students.

    “Young people are the hope of the world,” Dr. Crider told me. Current students, he added, “are capable of rising to the same standards as before, and we do them a disservice when we presume they’re too mentally ill or too traumatized to function.”

    A mantra of teaching, at any level, is “Meet the students where they are.” But if education is built on relationships, then colleges must equally insist students meet their teachers where they are. The classroom, the lab and the office are where we instructors do our best and where a vast majority of students can do their best, too. Our goal is to take students somewhere far beyond where they meet us.

  • May 11, 2022

    Creative work and process work

    Brandon Donnelly highlights a recent Nature study that found that virtual communication curbs creative idea generation:

    COVID-19 accelerated a decade-long shift to remote work by normalizing working from home on a large scale. Indeed, 75% of US employees in a 2021 survey reported a personal preference for working remotely at least one day per week, and studies estimate that 20% of US workdays will take place at home after the pandemic ends. Here we examine how this shift away from in-person interaction affects innovation, which relies on collaborative idea generation as the foundation of commercial and scientific progress… we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

    This intuitively tracks, doesn’t it? The process-oriented work we do, work like standing meetings, one-on-ones, compliance tasks, reports, etc., all of this can often be tackled even better through virtual communication like Zoom, Teams, etc. But the creative work, creative sprints to take an initiative or program from ideation to plan to execution, that work happens so much more naturally in person. Why? Because we’re metaphorically raising our vision up, rather than lowering our vision to focus on a camera or a screen.

    “[W]hen it comes to selecting which idea to pursue,” the study also notes, “we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups…” Creative ideation happens alone or in groups in person, but process work happens best remotely—something like that.

  • April 21, 2022

    ‘Pure creativity gets just as dull’

    Ben Conroy interviews art critic Elizabeth Lev:

    I’m curious about how Lev thinks the Church should go about engaging with the world of art in the modern age. In a space and time where Catholicism has less cachet, how do we make art that actually leads people to God?

    Lev’s answer surprises me. Catholics, she says, shouldn’t be afraid to make more explicitly and deliberately Catholic art. “There’s this whole 19th-century concept of ‘art should be free’, the separation from the artist from any kind of artistic standard or any kind of theme. The Church today when it tries to re-engage with art still has this 19th-century mantra drummed into its head.” Some of the art commissioned by the hierarchy, Lev thinks, is as a result not recognisably Catholic. “It’s, you know, ‘you should make me something that makes you think of Genesis’. There’s a work in the Vatican Museums, which is a blank canvas, and it’s supposed to be inspired by Genesis. This is 100 feet from Michelangelo’s image of Genesis.”

    In order to get people excited about the story Catholicism tells about the world, Lev thinks, the art has to portray or engage with that story. Lay people need to be more willing to commission and support good art that does just that.

    But if you make requirements too strict, I ask, won’t that drive away people who are likely to make good art? Isn’t the problem with much of Christian art today that it’s too didactic: Christian movies that are little more than sermons with a plot slapped onto them?

    Lev has a similarly low opinion of a lot of Christian film-making, but doesn’t think that overtly Christian content is the problem. She thinks that a healthy “tension between the sacred and the profane” actually makes art better. Sacred subject matter alone gives you twee holy cards, but without any structure or external standards for art; ‘pure creativity’ gets just as dull. “My favourite example, of course, is the Duchamp Fountain, the urinal … the man saw the whole situation right there!”

    We have to make and sponsor art, Lev says, from a position “where we’re in love with our own story”. The key to creating more excellent Catholic art is not giving artists, film-makers, and storytellers maximal freedom, but creating structures that will reward them for excellence.

    “Hollywood expects you to follow a certain line when you produce a work of art. Hollywood has a whole bunch of interesting, very defined rules about what you’re allowed and not allowed to do and yet somehow they attract the biggest and the best. Why? Because at the end of the day, you can become famous. You can become known, you can become more. At the end of the day an artist wants to communicate. So the great artists need a forum in which it looks like they’re going to be communicating to the many.”

    “[W]ithout any structure or external standards for art; ‘pure creativity’ gets just as dull”.

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