Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....

Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....: In trying to pressure Biden, the Catholic bishops forget the lessons of JFK So runs an opinion headline in the Washington Post. Well, as the...

Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.

Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.: 

A Corrective Warning.

We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only got to one, the recent Prime Minister of the United Kingdom's wedding.  We posted on that, we'd note, on a companion blog, which is where we intended and still more or less intend to comment on another thing, which was a recent change in Canon Law regarding punishments under the law for certain things.

The latter item created quite an odd stir on the Internet for reasons that are really unclear.  That was what the second post was going to more or less deal with.

Since that time, however, something we've dealt with here before has come up as a major news story, that being the almost certain move of Catholic Bishops to deny politicians the reception of the Eucharist if they publicly support abortion. This is in the news as it will impact the President, Joe Biden.

For sincere Catholics this news is both way overdue and the reaction to it incredibly surprising.  It's also had the impact of smoking out liberal cafeteria Catholics whose attachment to their faith is tempered by their politics and world view.  

To start off with, the Catholic faithful have long wondered why Catholic Bishops allow politicians to take the wishy washy "I'm personally opposed to abortion but. . ." cop out.  

The entire matter, as Canon Lawyer Edward Peters noted on, of course, Twitter seems pretty canonically clear.  Hence the surprise on the Captain Renault like "shocked shocked" reaction some liberal Catholics have been all atwitter with.

Here's the basics of it.

Catholics believe that every human being, no matter their condition or state in life, have a right to lift and that killing a human is homicide. This is the case whether or not a person is young or old, health or ill, intelligent or unintelligent, physically fit or dramatically impaired.

And it applies whether a person is born, or not. Catholics believe that a person's right to life is absolute, tempered only by the right of self defense.

Indeed, the last time the Church made news on this was when the Church modified the Catechism to provide that penal institutions and measurements had improved so much over the years that the death penalty was no longer morally justified.  This caused Catholic trads to be all atwitter in some instances.

That, however, was a mere development in a direction that Pope St. John Paul II had started decades ago.

The current controversy isn't even a new development in anything.  Catholics have held that abortion is infanticide since ancient times.  The sin has been regarded as so serious in more modern times that technically Canon Law precludes a confessor from forgiving it, requiring a Bishop to do that.  However, in many places, including the United States, the Church also has recognized that the sin is so common that this was unworkable and Bishops have extended permission to all confessors to forgive it.  A few years ago the Pope did that for the entire church worldwide, although I'm not up to speed on the current status that.

The Church has also always had a doctrine regarding "cooperation with evil".  Generally, "remote cooperation with evil" is regarded as inevitable. But direct open cooperation with evil can be a mortal sin.  For example, the driver of a getaway car in a robbery can't take the position that he's only a driver.  He's assisting in a great sin.  

Perhaps more illustratively, selling a handgun over the counter to somebody who intends to commit murder with it isn't a sin at all, if you have no knowledge of what he intends to do with it. But if a person specifically asks for somebody to provide a gun for a murder, a person can't morally do it.

This gets us to our current topic. The Church's concepts in this area, many of which tend not to be fully fleshed out, have long held that where politicians directly cooperate in an evil, just like where anyone else does, they bear moral responsibility for it and can be denied Communion.

For example, during the 1960s when desegregation was taking place, the Bishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Bishop Joseph Rummel, took the position that segregation was a great evil and, in 1962, excommunicated three Catholics in the diocese for organizing protests against desegregation in the diocese.  More correctly the excommunications were for defying Church authority. Two of the three recanted and were then reinstated to communion with the Church.

All of that is instructive as actions of this type are designed to be corrective, not punitive.  The thought is that a person is committing a great sin and the action is necessary to instruct them in that fact in a way that can't be ignored.

That's the thought here.

It's openly and obviously the case that Catholic politicians who have openly allowed for advanced positions that the Church has regarded as gravely evil should have correction long ago.  Conservative Catholics have long argued for this, but many rank and file Catholics have been baffled by it as well.  Now its going to happen.

Liberal Catholics, in many instances, are having a fit, but they ought to stop and pause for a moment.  It's always been accepted by the Catholic Church that to be a Catholic wasn't going to win you any friends.  On the contrary, Christ warned and the Church still holds that it would instead draw to you abuse.  It's expected that to be a Catholic, and holding the tenants of the Faith seriously, means you'll lose friends, family and even up to your life in some circumstances.  No "health and wealth" gospel here.  Not by a long shot.

The Church, in may people's views, should have taken this step long ago.  However, the thought seems to have been that there was a fear that taking it would drive people in this category further away.  The risk, on the other hand, was what the title of one of the linked in items below notes, that being scandal.

Now it seems that the Church has finally reached the point where its decided to do what many faithful Catholics in the pews have urged be done for many years, that being to deny Communion, which is not the same we'd note as Excommunication, to public figures who are openly and obviously assisting an evil.  

Some Catholics who take a liberal view of theology are now busy making what amount to real misstatements about the Church's theology.  I saw, for example, somebody who represented themselves as a CCD teacher noting that to be a Catholic doesn't mean accepting Humane Vitae.  Oh, yes, it does.  What being a Catholic means is that your life will be more difficult than others, including other Christians.

The Church, in taking this step, is taking it, at a point in which in some parts of the globe, as is often noted, the Church has been in decline. It's rarely noted that its expanding at an exponential rate elsewhere.  Where its in decline are in those areas where it has sought to accommodate the world the most. The parts of the Church internally that have grown the most in recent years are those parts everywhere which are the most observant.  That's a lesson for every organization everywhere, but the irony of this act now, which really won't occur until at least the end of the year, is that the times actually give liberty for the Church to take the action.  If it doesn't win the Church secular friends, it doesn't have any, anyway.  And if it causes those who have light attachments to the Church's teachings to be upset, perhaps they should deeply consider the nature of a Pearl of Great Price, and if they expected to win Heaven easily.

And if it seems that the Church is now out of sink with the World, well, it's never been in sink with it ever. When its been most in sink with it, things have not gone well for the Church. . . or the world.

Will Biden recant?  Or Pelosi?  That's hard to say.  Decades of supporting grave evil will have built up a great pride that will be hard for them to overcome.  But that they need to overcome it is at least a warning they need to receive.  We can pray that they do.  We can pray that everyone does.

Related threads:

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

Archbishop Chaput says what should have been said long ago. Scandal.

Lex Anteinternet: And new penal provisions of the Canon Law. What does it mean?

Lex Anteinternet: And new penal provisions of the Canon Law. What d...: The Church announced in early June that it was going to issue a revision to the section of Canon Law that deals with punishments for certain...

Churches of the West: BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.

Churches of the West: BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.: 

BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.

A Medieval wedding.

Boris Johnson and his longtime girlfriend, Carrie Symonds (now Johnson) married.

So what, you may ask.  Indeed, dulled by the long 2019-2021 parade of bad news of one kind or another, that was my initial reaction, even though there's an obvious Christian point to this story from the onset, as by marrying, they're no longer shacking up, if you will, even though they certainly haven't been shacking up in quarters that could be compared to a shack.  

Frankly, as an Apostolic Christian, I'd normally have probably made a comment at some point about their living arrangements as its clearly contradictory to the tenants of the Christian faith, and even in Europe this would have been poorly regarded in almost any society up until, well right now.  Now, it pretty much produces a yawn, as do the majority of other serious religious tenants shared by all of the Abrahamic religions on a variety of matters related to sex.  I.e., this conduct is regarded as seriously sinful by all the Christian religions, Judaism and Islam.  In the modern world, it seems, Christians, including some serious ones but also a lot of nominal ones, have decided that most of what the Apostles wrote down was elective in nature and that people pretty much get a vote on what is and what isn't sinful.

More on that here later.

That's not what sparked the news, as soon became apparent.  What did, is that Johnson and Symonds married in a Catholic cathedral in a Catholic ceremony.  For people who like to be shocked, amazed, or scandalized, this was shocking, amazing, and scandalous.  And the press all over the English speaking world reacted with a giant "WHAT? How could this be?"  For example, the New York Time ran this headline:

Why Could Boris Johnson Marry in a Catholic Church?

The Guardian, a British newspaper that has made inroads into this US, ran this bizarre historically dim headline:

Boris Johnson’s outdone Henry VIII in having his third marriage blessed by the Catholic church

Apparently the writers at this British paper are historical dimwits.

The Irish Times, less dim on the topic, ran this one, which was actually interesting and informative.

Boris Johnson baptised Catholic and cannot defect from Church, says canon law

And the Times headline gets to the crux of the matter.

That didn't keep, however, an Irish priest from stating that the wedding made a "mockery" of the Church's laws.

Which it does not.

I don't know much about Johnson personally,  Or indeed, hardly at all.  And among the things I didn't know is that his mother was Catholic and he was baptized by a Catholic priest.  His mother raised him as a Catholic as a child, but when he was in Eaton, he was confirmed (rather late, if we look at North American anyhow) by an Episcopal Bishop.

And that makes him an Episcopalian, right?

Well, that depends.

Carrying the story forward, in the 1980s he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen. The couple divorced in 1993 after six years of marriage.  She's currently married to a man 22 years her junior who is a Muslim, which has lead Johnson to put Mostyn-Owen on a Muslim relations task force.  Reportedly, she's given her husband permission to have more than one wife as she is unlikely to be able to bear children and of course polygamy is a feature of Islam, although that would not be legal anywhere in Europe, in so far as I know. ^[1]. 

His second wife was Mariana Wheeler, a childhood friend of Johnson's.  They married twelve days after his first divorce and she was pregnant at the time.  Their marriage lasted seven years.

So, eeh gads, surely this is contrary to Catholic teaching, right?  I.e., his current marriage to Symonds, age 33 (Johnson is 56), just can't happen, right?

To read the press, you'd think so.  I've read everything, however, from this can't happen as Catholics don't allow divorce to this could only happen as Catholics don't recognize the marriages of other faiths.  

That doesn't grasp the interesting religious angle, however, of this at all.

In reality, all of the Apostolic faiths, as well as some of the Christian faiths that are close to the Apostolic faiths and regard themselves as Apostolic, take Christs' injunction against divorce seriously, although they don't all approach it exactly the same way.  Interestingly, and completely missed in all of this, the Church of England doesn't recognize divorce.  The mother church of the Anglican Communion, that is, regards it as invalid, just as Catholicism does, which isn't surprising as High Church Anglicans regard themselves as a type of Catholic, even if the Catholic Church completely rejects that assertion as "completely null and utterly void".

We'll get to more of that in a minute, but perhaps the most peculiar of the approaches to divorce is the Orthodox one.  The Orthodox allow more than one marriage under a vague application of a mercy principal that tolerates, in some cases, up to three marriages.  It's tempting to compare this to the Catholic concept of annulment, and indeed it is somewhat comparable, but lacking in the formality.  The basic approach, however, is that the Orthodox only recognize one valid marriage, but accept that human nature is frail and people goof up, so it applies some leeway essentially as it generally feels that the problem of sex in human nature makes it difficult not to.  I'm not Orthodox, so I could be off on this by quite some margin.

The Catholic Church doesn't recognize divorce at all.  It does apply the principal of annulments where it judges that one of the original marrying parties lacked something to make that marriage valid.  I don't' know what percentage of people who go through the annulment process obtain one, but frankly it seems rather shockingly high, which as been a long criticism of it, and a valid one in my view.  Outside of that, however, Catholics hold that once you are married, its until death.  No exceptions, save for the one noted, which would hold that the first marriage wasn't valid, and therefore wasn't really a marriage.

So how on Earth could Johnson and Symonds marry in a Catholic cathedral?

Well that leads to messy press analysis.

The Irish Times, not surprisingly, had it best. 

Contrary to what some of the press elsewhere would have it, the Catholic church fully recognizes the marriages of non Catholics, and for that matter, non Christians.  If two Muslims marry, the Catholic Church regards them as married.  Married and can't divorce is how the Catholic Church would regard it, irrespective of how Muslims may view it.

And also contrary to what some of the press is claiming, the Church also recognizes the marriages of people who are two different faith, or no faith at all.  Go down to the Courthouse and have the judge marry you, in other words, and you are married.  

So what's the deal here?

That's where you get into Canon Law.

Originally the overwhelming majority of Christians, all of whom were Catholic, married outside of a Church ceremony.  Indeed, it was extremely informal.  People just decided they were to marry, and they were.  No wedding ceremony at all.  

That first began to change with monarchs, as their marriages were also effectively treaties between nations, and they wanted it to be really clear and official in every respect possible.   But also, during the Middle Ages, things began to change with regular people as the need for marriage witnesses arose. This was principally because one member of the couple would claim they were never married, usually the man, leaving he other, usually the woman, in a very bad position.

Indeed, even with very early Christian monarchs you can see this at work.  Some early Saxon and English kings, for example, had queens who were subject to this.  Hardecanute is a famous one who married with King of England, but who had a Scandinavian queen before and during that period. What was she?  Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon king of England, had a Saxon queen who was "married in the old style" and a Welsh queen to whom he was more formally married. When  he died at Hastings, it was apparently the Saxon queen, still around, that identified his body.

This presents a series of obvious problems and the Church therefore worked to clear it up, imposing the Canon law that Christians had to be married by a priest.  This served a number of purposes, one of which was that the wedding was therefore witnesses and couldn't be simply excused away.

It would be tempting to think that the current situation came about immediately upon the Reformation, but that would be in error.  Indeed, it's important to keep in mind that at the parish level, while the fact that the Church was in turmoil was obvious, the severance wasn't necessarily immediately apparent in the pews.  All of the original Lutheran priests, for example, had been ordained Catholic priests.  No Bishops followed Luther into rebellion in what is now Germany, so there was no way to ordain valid new priests in the eyes of the Catholic Church there, but in Scandinavia things muddled on in an unclear fashion for some time and the Scandinavian Bishops did follow their monarchs into a series of murky positions.

In England, the situation in the pews was also unclear. All of the original Anglican priests had been Catholic priests and most, but not all, of the Bishops followed Henry VIII into schism.  Eddward VI took the country as far from the Catholic folds as he could, but then Queen Mary brought the country back into the Church, although without completely success.  Then Elizabeth struck a middle ground, most likely for political reasons more than anything else.  As late as the Prayer Book Rebellion, 1549, Catholicism was still so strongly rooted in the minds of average Englishmen that they revolted over the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer which the conceived of as too Protestant.

The point of this isn't to introduce a treatise on the history of religion in England, but rather to note that for average people this must have been distressing, but if they were going to get married, they still went to the same place, the Church, and the presiding cleric presided over it.  This is important to our story here as, at least in England, in spite of an outright war by the Crown against Catholicism, the Church did not prohibit Catholics from marrying in a ceremony presided over by an Anglican priest and no dispensation was required for a "disparity of cult".

Indeed, it's widely believed that as late as 1785 the man who would reign as King George IV married Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic.  The marriage remains really murky in terms of details, as it was conducted in secret, and was arguably invalid because George IV had not obtained permission from George III, which was a legal requirement.  The marriage did not, however, require Fitzherbert to obtain permission from the Catholic Church and its believed it was conducted by an Anglian priest.  Interestingly, while George IV would later deny that the marriage was valid, and their relationship was rocky, it never completely ceased altogether and he asked to be buried with a locket containing her image.  George IV was officially married to his cousin Caroline of Brunswick in what was pretty clearly both an arranged and unhappy marriage that he did wish to terminate.  He died first.

So when, exactly, the current canon came in requiring permission for a marriage outside of a Catholic officiation, I frankly don't know.  It may not have occurred everywhere at the same time, for that matter.  Having said that, it seems to have been first mentioned as a Church law, and therefore a legal requirement binding Catholics, in 1563, so the example given above is problematic.

Note, however, that it binds Catholics.  Not other people, and the Church has never stated otherwise.  

Additionally, it binds Catholics as its a law of the Church.  In order for a Catholic to have a valid marriage, it must be presided over by a Catholic priest or there must be some dispensation.  If that doesn't occur it isn't valid, as to Catholics.

And that's what we have here.  It's not change in the law of the Church in any fashion. Boris Johnson was baptized as a Catholic and so he is a Catholic, the way that Catholics understand that.  Carrie Symonds is also a Catholic, and indeed, press comments about her routinely refer to her as a "practicing Catholic".  Her status in that regard is problematic as she and Johnson have been shacked up, which is contrary to Catholic moral law in a major way, but with their marriage, and presumably with a Confession that preceded it, that's no longer an issue of any kind.  And Symonds' views would otherwise be evident in that she had their son, born out of wedlock (see issue above again), baptized in the Catholic faith.

So, why al the fussing?

Well, for the most part at least knowledgeable Catholics aren't fussing.  Not everyone likes Johnson politically, but Catholics pretty much take a "welcome home" view towards this sort of thing.  So, the past is what its, and Boris is back. All is fine, religion wise.

Of course, some Catholics who don't know the doctrines of their own church, or who simply want to have a fit, are. But its' a pretty misplaced one.

Non Catholics can have a fit if they're predisposed to, as they don't understand the Church's law and they are often surprised to find that the Church retains its original position that as it is the original Church, which is indisputable, all others lack in some fashion. ^[2].  So this serves to remind people that the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church have a lot of similarities, but no matter what the Anglican Communion may maintain, the Catholic Church doesn't regard it as Catholic.  Of course, not all Anglicans wish to be regarded as Catholics, but some of them are offended as the fact that the Catholic Church isn't according them equivalency with the Catholicism is offensive to them.

More than that, however, a long held cultural anti Catholicism that came in with the reformation is still pretty strong in certain Protestant regions of Europe in spite of the decline of their Protestant established churches.   This is very evident in England, and is very strong in Scandinavia.  It's somewhat ironic in various ways, not the least of which is that these regions have become highly secularized and as that has occurred, the Church that has remained strong has been the minority Catholic Church, which has not only survived its long Reformation winter, but which has gained new adherents.

Does this mean that Johnson has fully returned to the Catholic fold and will be at Mass next Sunday?  Well, Catholics should hope so, and frankly so should Protestants as well. And there is some evidence that Johnson, who has lived a fairly libertine life, may in fact be taking his Christianity more seriously than he did in earlier days.  His recent address regarding the Pandemic specifically referenced Christ and his mercy, something that very few politicians would generally do, and European ones even less.

So, while people can have fits if they want to, all in all, they shouldn't.  Indeed, no matter what a person thinks of Johnson one way or another, there's reason to be happy about this development, and not just in being happy for the apparently happy couple if a person is inclined to be such.

Footnotes

1.  Having said that, I don't know if polygamy is legal in Turkey, which is obviously a Muslim majority nation, and which is in Europe, depending upon how you draw the continental lines.  Turkey has become increasingly Islamic under its current leadership but had years of aggressive secularism, so the status of Muslim polygamist marriages isn't a given, and I don't know the answer as to its status there.

2. The various Orthodox Churches also stretch back to Apostolic origins, which is why the Catholic and Orthodox Churches regard each others sacraments as valid, and also regard their separation as schismatic, depending upon which you are in, rather than an outright rebellion and departure as was the case with the Protestant Churches.

Churches of the West: A couple of interesting news items.

Churches of the West: A couple of interesting news items.: 

A couple of interesting news items.

It would be apparently to any long time reader of this blog, if there are any, that it hasn't been the same for over a year.  Indeed, it dramatically changed course, sort of, when COVID 19 hit.  That event pretty much changed everything, globally, and rather obviously, with one of those changes being that business travelers quit traveling.

I frankly don't think that business travel is coming back.  Video conferencing was coming in anyway and the pandemic spurred it along.  That's our new world now, even though we don't really have any idea, really, of what that new world is really going to be like.  We already know that, at this late stage of the pandemic, with COVID relief funds still operating in a lot of places, people in certain economic categories are refusing to come back to work.  This isn't just those making low wages, who are choosing to ride out the relief funds in hopes for hire wages.  It also includes a lot of professionals who have learned how to work from home and don't want to go back to their offices.  This is still paying out.

Anyhow, that means no new church photographs from afar.  And frankly, this blog was slowing down anyhow as a lot of the places I traveled to, I repeated.  There's more churches there, indeed there's more in town, but photographing targets of opportunity just don't exist like they did, although I should finish the ones in town.

Anyhow, as the number of church photographs have declined, those which are news items have seemed to increase, although that may not be fully accurate.  Some probably have seemed to increase as they're getting posted where as church photographs aren't.

Anyhow, as also noted here before, this isn't a Catholic Apologists blog. There are plenty of those and I'm not qualified to be one.  But I do comment on Christian news items from time to time and those are most often Catholic ones.

Catching my eye on Twitter yesterday was a comment by a priest to the effect that "everyone's an Apologist today".  I hadn't seen any big news items that would inspire a comment like that and I couldn't find one on Twitter.  Checking the news, I saw two, and these do turn out to be the inspiration for that comment.  One was that Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, married, and the other was that Pope Francis had issued a revision to the Church's Canon Law.  Reading the news reports I at first didn't see any reason that these were really even all that noteworthy.  But following up on it, they are, and they're interesting.  

So, following this, there will be a couple of comments on those.  Hope they're interesting.