Cardinal Pell vs Dan Barker on XT3

I also received an email yesterday from Larissa at the XT3 network.

Hi David,

My name is Larissa, and I work for Xt3.com. I check in on your great blog every now and again, and thought I would point out some audio we’ve got in the library that you might be interested in!

The audio for the Cardinal’s debate against Dan Barker, held at Macquarie Uni, is available on Xt3 here : www.xt3.com/library/view.php?id=1855 . We also video taped it, and will hopefully put the footage up next week in our media player.

Also, I noticed on your blog that you were quite keen to catch Dr Michael Casey and Professor Gerard Bradley’s public address on religious liberty, hosted by the Ambrose Centre. While the quality of this recording is not quite as high (we could not get a direct feed), I hope you enjoy it anyway! You can find it here: www.xt3.com/library/view.php?id=1853

Kind Regards,
Larissa
Xt3 Admin

I am more than happy to use SCE to promote XT3 and these recordings – which incidentally I just downloaded yesterday but have still to listen to. Enjoy!

Cardinal Levada reflects on ecumenism and Anglicanorum Coetibus

Rocco Palmo at Whispers in the Loggia carries this story:

Fresh off presiding and preaching at last week’s dedication of a new Nebraska seminary chapel for the traditionalist Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, the church’s “Grand Inquisitor” — California’s own Cardinal William Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — went North, using a Saturday address at a dinner in Kingston to offer his most in-depth comments to date on Anglicanorum coetibus, the Vatican’s controversial new pathway for groups of disaffected Anglicans to swim the Tiber whilst maintaining significant elements of the patrimony of the English church.

Reflecting the significance of Levada’s remarks, a transcript of his text has been posted by our friends at Salt + Light….

HT to Chris for sending me this link. The transcript of the speech can be found here, and it is, as Rocco notes, “lengthy”, but well worth reading in its entirety.

The speech falls into two sections, one where he outlines the history of ARCIC I and II (and the announcement by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury that there is to be a new round of ARCIC – ARCIC III – starting soon, on the topics of “Church as Communion, local and universal, and how in communion the local and universal Church come to discern right ethical teaching”) and then when he very frankly discusses the Catholic goal of ecumenism, in direct relation to Anglicanorum Coetibus using the musical image of a piano and a symphony orchestra.

The first section makes the obvious point that new issues have arisen since the first heady days of ecumenism causing divisions among Christians (both between Catholic and Protestant and within various communions, in particular the Anglican Communion), especially the issues of women’s ordination and homosexuality. It is certainly surprising, but true, that no bilateral dialogue between Christian communions has to date discussed either of these major current issues. Levada notes:

The only outstanding question on ministry and ordination that remained was the ordination of women, an issue that was new. I note here that the ARCIC statement on ministry was published in 1973 and only in 1976 did the first ordination of a woman priest occur in the Episcopal Church in the United States. In spite of the request of the Holy See for further elucidation on this question, the commission maintained that its mandate to examine the classical teaching on ministry and orders had been accomplished, and asked that the question of the ordination of women be remanded for consideration by its successive commission. Until now this issue has not been examined by ARCIC.

He also notes that while ARCIC II reached a fairly solid agreement that “the claim, sometimes made that homosexual relationships and married relationships are morally equivalent, and equally capable of expressing the right ordering and use of the sexual drive” was to be rejected, this agreement has been almost totally lost since the consecration of Gene Robinson by the Episcopal Church in the US.

It seems that the new ARCIC will at least address this latter issue, if not also the former.

But then Levada goes on to make some quite amazing and, as I said, frank claims about Catholic ecumenism, claims with which I find myself to be in full agreement. Here is just a slice of the entire cake:

Union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism—one could put, “we phrase it that way”. Yet the very process of working towards union works a change in churches and ecclesial communities that engage one another in dialogue, in actual instances of entering into communion do indeed transform the Catholic Church by way of enrichment. Let me add right away that when I say enrichment I am referring not to any addition of essential elements of sanctification and truth to the Catholic Church. Christ has endowed her with all the essential elements. I am referring to the addition of modes of expression of these essential elements, modes which enhance everyone’s appreciation of the inexhaustible treasures bestowed on the Church by her divine founder.

The new reality of visible unity among Christians should not thought of as the coming together of disparate elements that previously had not existed in any one community. The Second Vatican Council clearly teaches that all the elements of sanctification and truth which Christ bestowed on the Church are found in the Catholic Church. What is new then is not the acquisition of something essential which had hitherto been absent. Instead, what is new is that perennial truths and elements of holiness already found in the Catholic Church are given new focus, or a different stress by the way they are lived by various groups of the faithful who are called by Christ to come together in perfect communion with one another, enjoying the bonds of creed, code, cult and charity, in diverse ways that blend harmoniously.

Coincidentally, just on Thursday night I had the pleasure of sitting at dinner with an entire table of Anglicans, including clerics (some who would describe themselves as Anglo-Catholics) and a retired bishop. It was a case for me of “don’t mention the ordinariates”, but I need not have worried. They themselves raised it in their own discussions, and not in an entirely negatively way. One cleric commented that it was a strange business, because the announcement of the establishment of these ordinariates seemed to have sidelined the Vatican’s ecumenical council and its president, Walter Kasper. I argued that this is because Rome wanted to keep the two issues separate, that the ordinariates were not to be viewed as the Vatican’s “new way of doing ecumenism”. Levada’s speech has caused me to rethink this. Perhaps, in fact, this is the future for Catholic ecumenism. If that is so, then we really are entering a whole new phase of the ecumenical movement – at least between Catholics and Protestants.

A Tale of Two Brothers

The Atheist Convention is in full swing here in Melbourne. One of the “New Atheists” who is conspicuously absent from the show is Christopher Hitchens. Last night, celebrating my natal feast with my good Lutheran clergy friends Andrew and David, Andrew mentioned that there had been a “rapprochement” between Christopher and his brother Peter. It was the first I had heard of hit, but coincidentally there was an email waiting for me this morning from one of our commentators (HT to Paul) with a link to the full article on the matter by the younger Hitchens brother, the theist of the duo.

It is a fairly lengthy article, which goes rather deep into the history of the two brothers, and their long feud that seems (like most sibling rivalries in my experience) to long predate Peter’s conversion to Christianity when he was 30. But it is that stark difference, the one who believes that “religion poisons everything” and who “loathes and despises” all religious believers of all kinds, and the one who says that

I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so. It is a strange and welcome side effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now overcome this. Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

In the article, Peter does take the time to recount a number of issues on which he believes his brother is “astonishingly unable to grasp [the] assumptions [that] are problems for his argument.” Among these is the atheist’s :

fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.
I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.

Another is the

favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

Peter and Christopher have apparently occasionally participated in public debates against one another on the relative arguments for theism and atheism, the latest of these being in April 2008. Unfortunately, I cannot find a video or audio or transcript of this on the internet (perhaps a reader can assist?). But after the last debate, Paul admits that

Normally, I love to argue in front of audiences and we had been in public debates before. …But despite one or two low blows exchanged in the heat of the moment, I do not think we did much to satisfy them. I hope not.
Somehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected –and some might have hoped – that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not.
Both of us, I suspect, recoiled from such an exhibition, which might have been amusing for others, because we were brothers –but would have been wrong, because we are brothers.

The whole article makes fascinating reading, but perhaps that final lesson is the important one. Jesus said that faith in him would divide “father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:51-53) Peter has demonstrated that while this is the all-to-common outcome of differences in faith within family groups, this need not be so. We are told to love another, and Paul and his brother Christopher obviously do.