The phony pedantry and empty metaphysical thrill of Teilhard de Chardin

The resurgence of the ideological, political, and emotional aura or atmosphere of the 70s, that incalculably influential decade (bursting forth as it did on the petard of one year, 1968, though of course having been sparking for much longer) means that we today must take care not to forget the figures and events of that time -- not if we want to escape its clutches. (And those of us who lived through that time would dearly love some respite!)

In the realm of theology, if we are going to identify some of the causes of our current plight, one priest, Teilhard de Chardin, exerts an influence far beyond his name-recognition today, yet his errors remain with us in myriad ways.

His ideas were formless from the start. He never had a theory or position that could be stated with much confidence. It's the very penumbra of drama, of poetic, vague spiritualism, braced up by the settled-science-y cachet of evolutionary theory that characterized his attraction and of which, today, his magnetism consists. For the confused and those who wish to confuse, his theology is perfect.

In one message to my husband and me, Fr. Paul Mankowski put it this way: 

Teilhard has always struck me as bogus the way Matthew Fox is bogus: his language is designed to make clear things cloudy rather than the reverse, and always promises some kind of metaphysical thrill he never delivers on.  He has his admirers, but nobody has been able to build anything on T's work, the way bright grad students go on to advance the arguments of the thinkers they study.  You either get intoxicated by the guy or you don't.

The Jesuits and the corruption of their charism exert a disproportionate influence on the Catholic Church today. Obviously, the Pope is a Jesuit. His closest friends and influencers are Jesuits. And Pope Francis clearly admires Teilhard, a Jesuit. 

So, as I say, even if trying to grasp the man's thought is hopeless, the way, as we used to joke, nailing Jello to the wall is hopeless, we do need to know what it is and what its current cognates are. His ideas lend themselves to endless iterations (without necessarily any acknowledgment of their source -- who needs to footnote a feeling?).

I recommend reading the four Substack posts on the topic by Peter Kwasniewski as a primer in the era and its confusions. In the first part, he remarks about the long passage quoted by Pope Francis recently, "A bit wild and wooly, but one might be able to read it all in an orthodox way." 

An aside: How often one has sat in the pew listening to some grandiose verbiage from the pulpit, words spinning around, creating a tangled ball of something that, overall, gives us a squirmy sense; yet as we attempt to resist spending yet another Sunday riled up about the state of things, we find ourselves saying, "Wellll, I suppose one could interpret it in a not-wholly-erroneous way..."

But why? Why do we have to do this? Why are things not clear, spiritually healthy, ringing with the familiar clear bell-like tones of the past? Why are we perpetually in a state of having to quell our uneasiness (at best) or standing athwart destruction (at worst, and who are we to take on this task)? 

Back to Teilhard. Peter Kwasniewski goes on to say, after the "wild and wooly" bit:

Yet Teilhard de Chardin, the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, is not exactly an uncomplicated and uncontroversial figure. Phil Lawler describes him as "a French author whose odd mixture of eugenics and evolutionary theory drew several cautions from the Vatican during the pontificates of Pius XII and John XXIII. More recently his work has drawn interest from exponents of New Age spirituality."

In the third of Kwasniewski's posts, he looks at the assessment of recent authors, including Fr. Mankowski, who writes:

Tall, dapper, handsome and aristocratic—I’ll have to take Kirsch’s word for it here—Teilhard de Chardin was essentially a fraud. At bottom, he was a Ramada Inn lounge singer posing as a metaphysician.

I cringe to admit I have weighty opinion against me. Both Joseph Ratzinger and Flannery O’Connor were deeply impressed by Teilhard. I can only explain this admiration by the surmise that neither admirer had any formal education in science, and both were thus innocently susceptible to Teilhard’s pseudo-scientific pedantries...

Had Teilhard stuck to his cotton-candy metaphysics, he probably would have been ignored by his principal antagonists both inside and outside the Church. It was his claim to be a serious paleontologist and unflinching respecter of scientific fact that put his theology in the crosshairs.

 

I must chime in here on the general assumption that Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, admired and was even influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. Maybe. 

Keep in mind that one way Teilhard retains his hold among the theological elites is by evoking that slipperiest of "settled theories," evolution. Most academics are loathe to challenge it, lest they be branded anti-intellectual, so tight is the fist that strangles true scientific inquiry -- or, I should say, so absolute is the dictatorship on this matter. Question evolution (as a unified theory of the world, that is; spotted moths aside) and be shunned forever, is how it goes.

I don't know why Flannery O'Connor couldn't sniff out Teilhard. Normally she had exquisite common sense. And it's true that on occasion, Ratzinger took Teilhard's ideas seriously, perhaps because he had that gentleman-scholar's way of graciously giving the benefit of the doubt, combined with the universally observed caution to avoid foreign, and in this matter, dangerous, academic ground. From what I've read, though, it seems more a case of the smarter person allowing someone's insights, however odd, to spark his own more profound thoughts, rather than delving into them on their own merit. 

Certainly, portraying someone's position should not be mistaken for agreeing with it, necessarily. Teilhard was influential enough to merit at least that, at least at the time. 

I'm not suggesting that some of Ratzinger's assessments weren't positive -- it seems as if they were. However, in our polarized age, we don't have what his attention could also be: patience. Ratzinger's overall demeanor was that of a gentle academic willing to hear everyone out (to the detriment, ultimately, of his disciplinary role as pontiff). My impression is that sometimes he was employing a Thomistic approach; he seems often simply to be holding Teilhard's position out at arm's length to get a good look at it for description's sake. To give him credit, how many of us are willing to do that -- to characterize our opponent fairly, even at the risk of being thought of as giving assent?

The point I want to make is that when Ratzinger was on his ground, he dismissed the man pretty decisively. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, one of his later, more mature works, Ratzinger spends a paragraph summarizing Teilhard's conception of the universe, which he saw as an evolutionary process in which the cosmos undergoes a "series of unions" towards "a growing synthesis, leading to the 'Noosphere', in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are bended into a kind of living organism... In his view [emphasis added], the Eucharist... anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on." 

In the immediately following paragraph, Ratzinger offers a quite different, even opposing, view, and it is the one he commits to and expands upon for the rest of the chapter and, indeed, book. "The older tradition starts from a different conceptual model. Its image is not of an upward flying arrow, but of a kind of cross-shaped movement... " 

The ensuing treatment simply leaves behind Teilhard's idea -- his main idea -- and never picks it up again. It does seem to be the case that in his writings, Ratzinger never directly refutes Teilhard. But if we look at what he does say about his own thought, we understand that he seems to regard Teilhard as requiring mention, if only to juxtapose him against his, Ratzinger's, own solid grasp of "the tradition." 

In the same way, Teilhard requires mention today; he is that influential. If he didn't himself create the loopy, gnostic, pseudo-scientific claptrap passing for theology we endure today, he is a handy emblem of it. Sometimes it's helpful to put a face on bad ideas so they are recognizable. 

NB: Happy to know, thanks to Peter Kwasniewski, that along with Fr. Mankowski, my bestie C. S. Lewis also had no time for Teilhard: 

Ironically, the Anglican C. S. Lewis showed a much more “Catholic” sensibility than current Church leadership when, in 1960, he wrote to a Jesuit friend: “How right your Society was to shut up de Chardin!”

 

 

Is the Sede Vacans? Fr. Mankowski on the question

I am sure that many of my readers are followers of Fr. James Altman and have seen his latest video, in which he states that "Bergoglio is not the Pope" and indeed that is its title. You can read about it here in 1Peter5, and I agree with T. S. Flanders' analysis. 

Fr. Altman's mode is repugnant to me and his affect ought to set off warning bells; his words declaring his embrace of the rogue sedevacantist position repels me; his undermining of the careful work of faithful critics of this papacy over the years demoralizes me.

I have never liked Fr. Altman's abuse of the pulpit, where in my opinion, political rants from any side ought to be completely forbidden. There is plenty of scope for the homilist to impart as energetically as he likes the principles upon which one must act and judge in the public sphere. But Holy Mass ought to be a refuge from the sorts of fevered partisan polemics one meets everywhere else (and indeed legitimately engages in, without the fevered polemics part, in secular life).

I have been suspicious of his role in the "canceled priest" movement. It is undoubtedly a dire situation we have, where a priest can be sanctioned without due process, often for doing what the Church, in her perennial teachings and practices, urges him to do, such as admonish (austerely and without indulging his passions), teach, and carry out rituals according to prescription. However, there is scope for manipulation there and the faithful have to be alert. It grieves me to have to say so. Let's pray for all our priests.

In any case, one of my goals here is to share the treasury of correspondence and memory my husband and I had with our dear, departed friend Fr. Paul Mankowski. I don't see any particular mention of Fr. Altman in the archive, but there is an exchange that is pertinent to this situation. 

You see, the argument used to rationalize Fr. Altman's intemperance is that Pope Francis is just that bad. Believe me, we get the bad part. In fact, Phil and I have been accused of being schismatics for this reason: calmly arguing that he is a bad Pope. Our defense is that it's better than thinking he is no Pope at all. Why? Because it is for the bishops to decide such a thing. Yes, we understand their pusillanimity, their inaction, their strange, yet historically consistent, alas, state of denial. 

Our role as laity, as we see it, is to convince them that they must have courage. To do that, we need strong reasoning and a grip on sanity. 

Here is the exchange (from 2017! but remains relevant, until such time as the bishops do their duty by our confusion):

Fr. Mankowski to me: 

You're too young [not really, but kind of him to say so] to remember the comics in which Dagwood was hanging out his office window clinging to the ledge, while Mr Dithers stamped up and down on his fingers -- but in the same way I've felt myself suspended over the pit of Sede Vacantism while Francis comes out every other day to dance on my white knuckles.

Yet I tell myself that, strictly speaking, the sedes is not vacans yet.  The chair of Peter has a validly installed papal rump weighing upon it even though, alas, the rump is the only part of the pontiff that seems to be doing its job.

Ed Peters wrote earlier that, with regard to Canon Law, the current Code is in all matters of doubt presumed to be binding; i.e., unless a particular canon is explicitly deleted or altered in forma specifica that canon remains the authentically directive norm.

To continue to call myself a Catholic I'm applying the same reasoning to the Francis papacy.  Until and unless he formally and explicitly declares false the teaching of Familiaris consortio, Veritatis splendor, and the Gospel according to Matthew, I feel free to continue to regard them as current and directive Catholic doctrine.  In a word, everything above the papal shoulders may be vacant, but the See itself isn't.

I haven't said this in a homily.  Yet.

And my husband's reply:

That’s what I’ve been saying for a while now, to try to calm people down. There’s no reason to think of Francis as an Antipope, let alone as the Antichrist. Let’s stick to what we know and can readily demonstrate: he’s a bad pope. We’ve had bad popes before (although not quite of this variety), and survived. 

Even a year ago I would have thought it outlandish to say that you could comfort good Catholics by saying: We have a bad pope. But you can.

Regarding the suppression of the Traditional Mass

The breaking news: New Vatican document tightens restrictions on traditional liturgy

In a document released December 18, the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) has tightened restrictions on the use of the traditional Latin Mass, and banned the use of traditional rituals for Confirmation and Ordination.

The CDW also rules: that a priest who celebrates Mass in the ordinary form on a weekday cannot also celebrate the traditional Mass on the same day; that a diocesan bishop requires Vatican approval before giving permission for a newly ordained priest to use the traditional rite; and that any celebration of the traditional Mass in an ordinary parish cannot be incorporated into regular parish schedule.

Pope Francis's restrictions are in direct opposition to the clear intent of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. These clarifications of Traditionis Custodes in this new document are a plain rejection of the latter's "mutual enrichment" and generous encouragement of what is, after all, the patrimony of the Church.

Our friend Fr. Mankowski SJ, who suddenly passed away last year, was as far as I know, a staunch supporter and practitioner of that avis rara, "the reverent Novus Ordo." 

Phil and I were remembering recently that nevertheless, he used to call the Traditional Latin Mass "the seed corn."

Now just think about that. Let it sink in. As time goes on, I find this a prophetic characterization, and perhaps one that offers hope. I think he understood that death would come, at the end of what might be thought of as a "bad planting season." At the turn of the new one, the stores of the Church would have to yield up their hidden treasures for new growth to occur. 

 

Attention to hygiene

Anent my previous post about Holy Communion on the tongue, and how strange it is that our hierarchy seems to have successfully indoctrinated the majority of the faithful in the hygienic myth that on the hand is safer, and in honor of the new collection of some writings of Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ (more to come -- one edited by my husband and another by another friend of Father's), I reproduce here in full an email conversation of note*:

From Fr. Mankowski to three friends, circa August 2020:

"Receive this mask as a sign of craven submission, and future docility, before the moral faddisms of profane elitist authority.  May CNN, Disney, and Under Armour, who have begun this work in you, bring it to fulfillment ..."

From me to three friends:

That is a nice effort at parody, but in future I suggest that you try something not so close to reality -- the effect is better. I realize that things in the parody business are getting more difficult, but try harder.

I can't help remembering that some years ago (I've lost track), the sanitizer bottle made its way onto the credence table. Now at our parish (which truly is one of the better ones), there is a bottle on a pedestal -- yes, a small pedestal -- in a few places in front of the sanctuary and at the entries.

We call this "organic development of liturgy" and "authentic inculturation."

The sanitizing of the celebrants' hands is a nice addition, as is the paten with the hosts to be distributed placed some inches away from the main one, and the positioning of the concelebrant 6 feet away from the altar (specifics are on file at the diocesan offices). **

I heard last night from a friend that in his diocese (Joliet?), Communion was distributed through a slot in the plexiglass -- it made it difficult but not impossible! for him to receive on the tongue...

Future historians and archeologists will have a fine time documenting all of this when the remains of our faith are dug up...

 

From Fr. Mankowski to three friends: 

I can't help remembering that some years ago (I've lost track), the sanitizer bottle made its way onto the credence table.

When you think of how many hundreds of millions of hosts were placed on hundreds of millions of tongues in Catholic churches, the practice itself should have long served as an epidemiological benchmark -- from the very beginning of epidemiology, in fact -- if transmission of disease thereby ever reached the faintest statistically measurable level.  Given the attention to hygiene of the average priest over the past centuries, the insignificance of the morbidity stats points, if anything, to the miraculous properties of the consecrated host. 

*Sorry for the shock value that readers might find herein, but Fr. M was not a tame servant of the Lion. 

**For Fr. M's parody of this careful, Covid-aware placement of the paten, go here.

Thinking about Jael

First, a warm welcome to my new followers here! A quick note about this blog:

Here you can expect the sort of thing I might post on Twitter or Facebook: my thoughts about something out there, whether a news story or a study or a book -- anything, really. On my blog Like Mother, Like Daughter, I like to welcome you to my world with at least one picture, and have a little chat about cozy things. There has to be one place that is not polemical (even if occasionally it does become so, for no apparent reason). 

On Instagram it's obviously about pictures -- do visit me there too. I am currently posting along with Bridget about our great galavant Out West, so if you were wondering about the radio silence here, your curiosity will be satiated, I believe, if you head over there.

But this is the spot I created to comment on current events and other thoughts without having the self-imposed limitation of posting a picture, and most of all, without the unnecessary drama brought on by Twitter and Facebook. That said, I welcome cordial (even if oppositional) comments here. My policy is to leave any well meaning comment stand. I reserve the right to delete abusive or spammy ones, of course.

I will not share the list you have subscribed to with anyone! I would love it if you shared this blog with your friends!

But on to more interesting things!

The hot topic of women preaching (ignited by the often clumsy, yet not incorrect assertions by some that women ought not to do it) reminded me of my one and only foray into meme-creation, which I can no longer find, but was along these lines that I first posted on Twitter: 

 

TFW you don't want to preach, you just want to drive a tent stake into your enemy's head because the men aren't doing their damn job

My expostulation was brought on by the German bishops clamoring for women preaching, which seems both patronizing and pandering all at once, and self-incriminating to boot. Men are so frustrating.

I admit that when I did a search for a depiction of Jael driving a stake through the head of Sisera (as prophesied by Deborah, see the Book of Judges, chapter 4), I didn't notice her bare breast in this one until I had posted it. But I stuck by my choice, because of course, the point is that she is a woman, and not only that, pay attention to the story:

19 Sisera said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink. I’m thirsty.” So she opened a jug of milk, gave him a drink, and hid him again. 20 Then he said to her, “Stand at the entrance to the tent. That way, if someone comes and asks you, ‘Is there a man here?’ you can say, ‘No.’”

21 But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent stake and a hammer. While Sisera was sound asleep from exhaustion, she tiptoed to him. She drove the stake through his head and down into the ground, and he died.

[emphasis added] 

The Baroque painting (by Gregorio Lazzarini, 17th century painter) brilliantly highlights both her feminine nature and her manly deed. I note in passing that it is only our remarkably prurient, yet also fatally puritanical, age that finds something shocking about depicting the female figure this way in art. All matters to ponder...

Anyway, and this is not at all polemical, when I was poking around for the actual meme I had made, I came across this email exchange in our little friend group with Fr. Mankowski, and thought I'd share it with you fellow irony-perceivers, humor mavens, and Wodehouse fans. I won't apologize for the length, because it's worth it, as is any story where the errant guy gets it in the noggin (although in this case, repentance saves the day, his soul, and the romance)! So here you go:

From Fr. M:

Leila, the painting of Jael killing Sisera pinned to your Twitter page put me in mind of this passage from Wodehouse ("The Salvation of George Mackintosh").  Celia had confided to The Oldest Member that her fiancé made her life unbearable by telling and retelling stories non-stop while on the golf course.

****

"I want your advice," said Celia.

"Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way," I said, looking round, "where is your fiancé?"

"I have no fiancé," she said, in a dull, hard voice.

"You have broken off the engagement?"

"Not exactly. And yet -- well, I suppose it amounts to that."

"I don't quite understand."

"Well, the fact is," said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, "I rather think I've killed George."

“Killed him, eh?”

It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was presented for my inspection I could see its merits. In these days of national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George Mackintosh. George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had taken a woman’s intuition to see it.

“I killed him with my niblick,” said Celia.

I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a niblick shot.

“I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine,” the girl went on, “with George talking all the time about the recent excavations in Egypt, when suddenly -- you know what it is when something seems to snap --”

“I had the experience with my shoe-lace only this morning.”

“Yes, it was like that. Sharp -- sudden -- happening all in a moment. I suppose I must have said something, for George stopped talking about Egypt and said that he was reminded by a remark of the last speaker’s of a certain Irishman -- ”

I pressed her hand.

 “Don’t go on if it hurts you,” I said, gently.

“Well, there is very little more to tell. He bent his head to light his pipe, and well -- the temptation was too much for me. That’s all.”

“You were quite right.”

“You really think so?”

“I certainly do. A rather similar action, under far less provocation, once made Jael the wife of Heber the most popular woman in Israel.”

From me: 

Haha! I’ll have to work that in somehow.

Without any undue modesty I have to say that that tweet was some of my finest work. “Well put!” as the uncle says about his own joke in Fiddler on the Roof. 

From Fr. M:

The story continues nicely too:

*****

She burst into a torrent of sobs.

"Would you care for me to view the remains?" I said.

"Perhaps it would be as well."

She led me silently into the ravine. George Mackintosh was lying on his back where he had fallen.

"There!" said Celia.

And, as she spoke, George Mackintosh gave a kind of snorting groan and sat up. Celia uttered a sharp shriek and sank on her knees before him. George blinked once or twice and looked about him dazedly.

"Save the women and children!" he cried. "I can swim."

"Oh, George!" said Celia.

"Feeling a little better?" I asked.

"A little. How many people were hurt?"

"Hurt?"

"When the express ran into us." He cast another glance around him. "Why, how did I get here?"

"You were here all the time," I said.

"Do you mean after the roof fell in or before?"

Celia was crying quietly down the back of his neck.

"Oh, George!" she said, again.

He groped out feebly for her hand and patted it.

"Brave little woman!" he said. "Brave little woman! She stuck by me all through. Tell me--I am strong enough to bear it--what caused the explosion?"

It seemed to me a case where much unpleasant explanation might be avoided by the exercise of a little tact.

"Well, some say one thing and some another," I said. "Whether it was a spark from a cigarette----"

Celia interrupted me. The woman in her made her revolt against this well-intentioned subterfuge.

"I hit you, George!"

"Hit me?" he repeated, curiously. "What with? The Eiffel Tower?"

"With my niblick."

"You hit me with your niblick? But why?"

She hesitated. Then she faced him bravely.

"Because you wouldn't stop talking."

He gaped.

"Me!" he said. "I wouldn't stop talking! But I hardly talk at all. I'm noted for it."

Celia's eyes met mine in agonized inquiry. But I saw what had happened. The blow, the sudden shock, had operated on George's brain-cells in such a way as to effect a complete cure. I have not the technical knowledge to be able to explain it, but the facts were plain.

"Lately, my dear fellow," I assured him, "you have dropped into the habit of talking rather a good deal. Ever since we started out this afternoon you have kept up an incessant flow of conversation!"

"Me! On the links! It isn't possible."

"It is only too true, I fear. And that is why this brave girl hit you with her niblick. You started to tell her a funny story just as she was making her eleventh shot to get her ball out of this ravine, and she took what she considered the necessary steps."

"Can you ever forgive me, George?" cried Celia.

George Mackintosh stared at me. Then a crimson blush mantled his face.

"So I did! It's all beginning to come back to me. Oh, heavens!"

"Can you forgive me, George?" cried Celia again.

He took her hand in his.

"Forgive you?" he muttered. "Can you forgive me? Me--a tee-talker, a green-gabbler, a prattler on the links, the lowest form of life known to science! I am unclean, unclean!"

"It's only a little mud, dearest," said Celia, looking at the sleeve of his coat. "It will brush off when it's dry."

Are we humans?

The tendency to use the word "humans" to refer to mankind damages our self-understanding, and it's used, thoughtlessly I believe, by even the most refined thinkers in these ideological days of ours. This usage has a curious evolution. 

Feminists understood that they could change how people thought about fundamental realities of life -- being a man or a woman, in this case -- without opposition, simply by making certain strategic demands. They weren't above couching these demands in terms that begged for a chivalrous response, ironically enough.

The general public dropped "man" and "mankind" and began to say "people" universally when "inclusive language" -- a political tool designed by feminists to control speech for their own ends, ends inimical to natural law -- became the norm. In academe especially, they succeeded in replacing ordinary speech with "inclusive language" (and this was their triumph of using an appeal to chivalry for egalitarian ends) and thereby achieved results without a struggle.

Feminists knew they had to control the social media of the time in order to change the minds of the great mass of people. Magazines and TV were the media through which opinions could be changed without the need for argumentation. They grasped the Marxist idea that communication itself is a means. And they succeeded in controlling the language to the extent that many children seem not to recognize older texts using the word "man" to mean "men and women," even when they continue to use "man" in its linguistically productive sense (as Fr. Paul Mankowski explains), in forming or recognizing new words.

English "man" remains a preeminently productive morpheme. This is obvious from the fact that speakers are continually using it spontaneously and unreflectively in the creation of new compounds, not only in such terms as "hit-man," "bag-man," "airman" and "manned flight," but even in words we have seen emerge in our own adult lifetime, such as "point man" or "pacman." A few moments' consideration will show that "humanity," "people," or "person" are not productive in this way.

(Read the whole essay, which focuses on inclusive-language translations in Scripture and the Liturgy, but can illuminate the general question.)

In our more managerial and utilitarian time, yet another ideological usage has taken hold: The deliberately imposed replacement "people" has been itself been replaced by "humans." I don't as yet know how this came about; it seems not to have been a conscious effort on the part of any group of agitators. Humans brings a particular context, albeit subliminally; namely, the biological categorization of animals. In biology, humans are studied next to other species; we would speak of humans as a kind of mammal, or in contradistinction to birds. It's not a word that was used to mean man in the old sense, for as a scientific term, it takes no notice of the immaterial aspect of the human being.

Using "humans" in a sentence like "Humans have been making mistakes in governance since ancient times" makes a category mistake, because man is rational, unlike the animals -- monkeys don't govern and clams don't make mistakes.

To use the word "humans" instead of "people" or "man" in non-biology discussions tends, I'd argue, to imply that man is not a rational creature -- that he has not been endowed by God with the capacity to reason and thus to share in the immaterial world of the angels and of divine life itself.

When I posted these thoughts on Facebook, Tony Esolen said, "I always mark 'humans,' in my students' papers, with the comment, 'sci-fi lingo'." He tends to confirm my intuition that it is a scientific term -- and not a complimentary one -- that fails to acknowledge man's soul. And that implication becomes a feature of the user's world view, just as "inclusive" language formed ideological egalitarianism between the sexes in those who adopted it.

A note about the term "human person," which may seem to overcome the difficulty of the over-technical term human, in that the added word "person" connotes the rational side: First, "person" is not productive in the linguistic sense. It's awkward to form new words or replace old ones with it -- we are self-conscious when we say "garbage person" and if military, we would not bother to refer to a "pointperson" -- even if in so doing we would increase our virtue signal. Second, "person" is also a technical term, this time in theology, not biology. It lacks "homeyness" or common use. The man on the street cannot be counted on to recognize it as anything other than a redundancy, and an effete one at that. It can be argued that it will gain that comfortable connotation as it is used, but these things can't be forced. Honesty requires us to ask whether we would have used the term "man" or "mankind" in the context that we use "human person"* but are too ashamed to do so, simply because we sense it would not be politically correct.

*edited to include "human being" in this lexicon of substitutes for the straightforward yet more meaningful "man."

Fr. Mankowski on Covid consecrations: The sort of thing I would post on Facebook...

This new blog is an experiment.

I made it so I can post little things I would want to share on Facebook (or even Twitter), if I were convinced it is the best way anymore.* I have not been sure how to start...

How about an email exchange, not too long ago, between some of us and Fr. Paul Mankowski SJ, RIP**  

I was pondering the slippage into even more irreverence and even sacrilege since Covid restrictions have been in place than what we were already used to.

Chappie A (let's call him Phil), in this email exchange, remarks: 

Here’s a striking line from the (astonishingly pettifogging) guidelines for reopening churches in the Boston archdiocese:

"During the consecration, hosts to be distributed should be placed on a second corporal to the side, so that they are not directly in front of the priest."

So will these hosts be consecrated or not?

Chappie B, Fr. Mankowski, replies:

OK, well let's suppose the paten on the main corporal is 14 inches directly in front of the celebrant, and the ciborium on the adjacent corporal is the same distance from the edge of the altar but at an angle of 42 degrees from the celebrant. 

The relevant trig function is sin θ = a/h, i.e. 1.4945 = h/14, whence h = 20.923. 

Assuming that consecratory power is inversely proportional to the distance between priest and consecranda, this means that the hosts in the ciborium are 66.9% the Body of Christ, and that ought to be enough for any docile Catholic.

And that about sums it up...