{"id":890,"date":"2008-11-21T10:01:45","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T10:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/full-text.html"},"modified":"2008-11-21T10:01:45","modified_gmt":"2008-11-21T10:01:45","slug":"full-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/full-text.html","title":{"rendered":"Full Text"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen has posted the full text of Cardinal Stafford’s “apocalyptic” speech to the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family:<\/a>
\nIt is an essentially philosophical and theological reflection, although that, of course, is not what garnered attention:<\/p>\n

For 51 years of priestly ministry I have been attentive to res sacra in temporalibus in American culture, i.e., \u201cto the elements of the sacred in the temporal life of man\u201d or, in a more Heideggerian idiom,\u201cto man as the sacred element in temporal things\u201d. In 1958 John Courtney Murray, S. J. was my guide. With further guidance from the Church over the years, I have learned that the nucleus of this principle, enunciated by Pope Leo XIII, maintains that the sacred element in secular life, especially our use of language, escapes the undivided control of the supreme power of the State. The secular life of man is not completely secular, nor totally encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and subject ultimately only to the political power. The sacred word within man in secular life transcends the control of the supreme power of the State. A person\u2019s public life is not encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and not subject ultimately only to the political power.
\nPresident Thomas Jefferson\u2019s celebrated 1802 letter to the committee of the Danbury Baptist Association asserting \u201ca wall of separation between Church and State\u201d formally denied the reality of res sacra in temporalibus. He introduced a latent and powerful virus which would eventually be used to diminish and then to wound mortally a theology of discourse in the public arena. It has led to the increasingly secularized states of the American union and their active hostility towards the Catholic Church. Some of these governments are threatening Roman Catholic adoption agencies because of their refusal to select same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents. They are forcing Catholic hospitals to accept medical procedures which are contrary to the dignity of the human person. They are insisting on hiring practices which will destroy the Catholic identity of health and social services under Catholic Church auspices. They have not refrained from coercing the individual conscience. Here the federal and state governments are enshrining the primacy of secular laws over against religious principles. These decisions are the legal and moral progeny of Jefferson\u2019s insistence on debarring personal faith from the public forum. And this is only a beginning. Their seeds can be found in the 1787 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom sponsored and promoted by Jefferson. His self-proclaimed epicureanism and crypto-utilitarianism furnish the hermeneutical keys for interpreting the opening paragraph of his 1776 Declaration of Independence.
\nThis evening. I will cover the following areas: 1) the narrow, calculative, mathematical mind and its manipulation of the humanum and, more specifically, of human sexuality since 1968; 2) the response of the Church\u2019s magisterium in the encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae and teachings of later Popes; 3) other Catholic philosophical and theological responses to what John Rawls calls the \u201cembedding module\u201d, namely the increasingly disenchanted world in which we work and pray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole talk is fascinating – but just skipping to the end, which found its way into the news, in garbled form:<\/p>\n

On November 4, 2008 a cultural earthquake hit America. Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joseph Biden were elected President and Vice President of the United States together with a significant majority of their Party in the federal Congress supporting their deadly vision of human life. Americans were unanimous in their joy over the significance of the election of a Black President. However, if Obama, Biden and the new Congress are determined to implement the anti-life agenda which they spelled out before the election, I foresee the next several years as being among the most divisive in our nation\u2019s history. If their proposals should be initiated and enacted, it would be impossible for the American bishops to repeat in the future what their predecessors described the United States in 1884 as \u201cthis home of freedom.\u201d
\nWhile reflecting about the profoundly negative impact of Obama\u2019s vision on the humanum (and also of Biden\u2019s), I recalled how current are the reflections of Mauriac upon his contemporary, an influential European author. Even though Mauriac disagreed with him on almost every point, he acknowledged his great intelligence and personal attraction. \u201cBut under all that grace and charm there was a tautness of will, a clenched jaw, a state of constant alertness to detect and resist any external influence which might threaten his independence. A state of alertness? That is putting it mildly: beneath each word he wrote, he was carrying on sapping operations against the enemy city where a daily fight was going on.\u201d.
\nSimilar characteristics were evident in Senator Obama\u2019s talk before Planned Parenthood supporters on July 17, 2007 – tautness of will, a clenched jaw, etc. – where he asserted, \u201cWe are not only going to win this election but also we are going to transform this nation………The first thing I will do as President is to sign The Freedom of Choice Act……..I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law………..On this issue I will not yield..\u201d During a town meeting in March 2008 in Johnstown, Pa., he spoke with equal determination on the necessity of universal sex education for preteens and teens, \u201cI don\u2019t want my daughters punished with a baby.\u201d The President – elect did not qualify in any way the methods his single daughters might employ in the event they needed to avoid being \u201cpunished with a baby\u201d, that is, giving birth to his grandchild. Obama\u2019s vision is modernist and rooted in the Enlightenment. The content and rhetoric of Obama and Biden have elements similar to those described earlier: aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.
\nCatholics weep over Barack Obama\u2019s words. We weep over the violence concealed behind his rhetoric and that of Joseph Biden and what appears to be that of the majority of the incoming Congress. What should we do with our hot, angry tears of betrayal?
\nFirst, our tears are agonistic. Secondly, we must acknowledge that the model for our tears is ancient. Over the next few years, Gethsemane will not be a marginal garden to us. A model, I suggest, is medieval. With an anonymous author, our restless minds search in a dark valley during this exhausting year. With him as our guide, we find a bleeding man on a hill sitting under a tree \u201cin huge sorrow\u201d. It is Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church and of mankind.
\nThirdly, we listen to the words of Christ as narrated by our mediaeval ancestor. Jesus pointing to his gloved hands says that these gloves were given him when he sought his Bride. They are not white but red, embroidered with blood. He says that his spouse brought them and they will not come off. Fourthly, we focus our attention on the constantly repeated refrain of the Bridegroom and the reason for his \u201chuge sorrow\u201d, \u201cQuia amore langueo – Because I am sick for love\u201d. And finally, we find that before this vision of the wounded young man, our frustration and tears become one with his \u201chuge sorrow\u201d and we make his love for the unfaithful Bride whom he seeks and never fails, our own. I will close with a citation of this spousal model. It serves as a measure of what we need to recapture for the whole Church in 2008:
\nUpon this hil Y fond a tree,
\nUndir the tree a man sittynge,
\nFrom heed to foot woundid was he,
\nHis herte blood Y sigh bledinge:
\nA semeli man to ben a king, (handsome enough to be a king)
\nA graciouse face to loken unto;
\nI askide whi he had peynynge, (suffering)
\nHe seide, “Quia amore langueo. (Because I am sick for love).
\nI am Truelove that fals was nevere.
\nMy sistyr, Mannis Soule, Y loved hir thus.
\nBicause we wolde in no wise discevere, (because in no way would we part company)
\nI lefte my kyngdom glorious.
\nI purveide for hir a paleis precious; (prepared, a palace)
\nSche fleyth; Y folowe. Y soughte hir so,
\nI suffride this peyne piteuous,
\nQuia amore langueo.
\nIn the autumn of 2008 we must begin anew with that sentiment of our medieval brother. Quia amore langueo. With Jesus we are sick because of love toward those with whom we are so tragically and unavoidably at variance. The reader has now become one with the narrator who is addressed in line one as \u201cDear Soul\u201d. As Humanae Vitae with the whole Catholic tradition teaches, we are to \u201cbe true with body and soul\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen has posted the full text of Cardinal Stafford’s “apocalyptic” speech to the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family: It is an essentially philosophical and theological reflection, although that, of course, is not what garnered attention: For 51 years of priestly ministry I have been attentive to res sacra in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFull Text - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/full-text.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Full Text - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}