Confessing Evangelical

To round off my short series of long posts on the Blessed Virgin Mary (1 | 2 | 3), and as something to keep things ticking over while I'm away on holiday, a quick survey to find out what people's views are on the issues we've been considering in these posts (please do also feel free to continue the discussion in the comments to those posts).

If you'd like to take part, please answer the following questions in the comments for this post:

1. Which of the following teachings do you agree with?:

    a. Mary the Mother of God.

    b. Mary the Ever-Virgin.

    c. The Immaculate Conception.

    d. The Assumption.

    e. Mary the Co-Redemptrix/Mediatrix

For each of the above, please answer: "Yes, as a necessary doctrine" (i.e. dogma), "Yes, as a pious opinion", "No, but others are free to do so as a pious opinion", or "No, this is a false teaching that must be rejected". Or whatever else best fits your views - this isn't a tick-box exercise.

2. Do you practice any form of Marian devotion, and if so what (use of the Ave Marial, rosary, "evangelical commemoration" etc)? If not, is this because you consider it merely unnecessary, or as actively wrong?.

Please could you also mention your church affiliation.

I've kicked things off by putting my own answers in the comments. I'm off on holiday for a week after today, so I look forward to seeing what answers people have given by the time I get back!

Pr Weedon posted this in the comments to my previous post, and I thought it would bear posting more prominently here. From the Brotherhood Prayer Book:

Evangelical commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary

After each office may be said privately the evangelical commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, Lord Jesus, and the breasts which nursed Thee: Yea, blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

V. Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son. Alleluia!
R. And shall call His name Immanuel. Alleluia!

Let us pray.

Almighty God, who hast dealt wonderfully with Thy handmaiden, the Virgin Mary, and hast chosen her to be the Mother of Thy Son and hast graciously made known that Thou regardest the poor and lowly and the despised, grant us grace in all humility and meekness to receive Thy Word with hearty faith and so to be made one with Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.

Amen.

[She is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ ... She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough. Still honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures.

(Martin Luther, Christmas Sermon, 1531)

A very different Lutheran approach to the veneration of Mary from that of Dr Sasse is promoted by Darel Paul, a Lutheran layman who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College in Massachusetts. Prof. Paul's Orthodox Lutheran website (linked from Revd Webber's Lutheran Theology site) includes a range of materials on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which he argues that the Lutheran Church has lost site of the high regard and fond devotion towards Mary shared by the Lutheran Reformers and Confessors.

In his essay, "The Blessed Virgin Mary and Christian Dogma", Prof. Paul looks at the Lutheran attitude towards the four Marian dogmas held by the Roman Catholic Church. These are the two pre-Reformation Marian dogmas - Mary Mother of God (declared by the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431) and Mary Ever-Virgin, (declared at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 553) - and the two further dogmas of modern times, Mary's Immaculate Conception (declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854) and the Bodily Assumption of Mary (declared by Pope Pius XII in 1950, and which prompted the letter from Dr Sasse covered in my previous post).

He argues that both pre-Reformation Marian doctrines were retained as Christian doctrine by the Lutheran Reformers. In addition to the statements in the Lutheran Confessions set out in my first post, Prof. Paul also points to the statement of the Augsburg Confession that "reminds us of the fundamental agreement of the Reformers with the traditional church":

Only those things have been recounted whereof we thought that it was necessary to speak, in order that it might be understood that in doctrine and ceremonies nothing has been received on our part against Scripture or the Church Catholic. For it is manifest that we have taken most diligent care that no new and ungodly doctrine should creep into our churches.

He argues that, while the Confessions' affirmation of Mary, Ever-Virgin is less clear-cut on the face of it than their affirmation of Mary, the Mother of God, other comments made by Martin Luther and others make it clear that any ambiguity in the Confessions is to be resolved in favour of Mary's Ever-Virginity.

Not only that, but Prof. Paul also argues that both the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption of Mary into heaven were accepted by the Reformers. The fact that we reject the Papal declarations of these beliefs as binding dogma "does not mean that the teachings themselves are wrong or that they contradict Scripture"; just that the lack of clarity in Scripture and in church tradition concerning these peripheral matters are such that "they cannot be forwarded as clear deposits of the faith".

As Luther says concerning the Immaculate Conception:

In regard to the conception of our Lady they have admitted that, since this article is not necessary to salvation, it is neither heresy nor error when some hold that she was conceived in sin, although in this case council, pope, and the majority hold a different view. Why should we poor Christians be forced to believe whatever the pope and his papists think, even when it is not necessary to salvation?

However, Luther still insists that the angel's declaration of Mary as being "full of grace" should be taken to heart, even if we do not insist on how and when this happened:

In the first place, she is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin - something exceedingly great. For God's grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil.

In short, "Lutherans ... should be more concerned with the dogmatization of this teaching than with the actual teaching itself.

The same applies to the Assumption. One historical piece of evidence supporting this teaching (indeed the only one, as Dr Sasse acerbically points out) is the striking failure of the church to expend any significant energy on tracking down relics of Mary. The absence of such relics was explained in AD 451 by the Patriarch of Jerusalem by the fact that "Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later ... was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven."

As for the Lutheran Confessions, while they are silent on the question of whether Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, the Apology to the Augsburg Confession does state "that the blessed Mary prays for the Church".

Prof. Paul's website is perhaps best known for its promotion of his Lutheran Rosary. Prof. Paul argues that Luther's attacks on the rosary were aimed at "the overuse and the misuse of the rosary rather than against the rosary itself", and that it is possible to have an Evangelical understanding of the rosary that avoids any question of its being a meritorious work.

As part of his discussion on the rosary, Prof. Paul talks about the Ave Maria, the "Hail Mary" prayer. This was retained by Luther in the following form:

Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ. Amen.

This is, Prof. Paul argues, "an excerpt from scripture (Luke 1:28, 42) and thus should find no objection from Lutherans today". It is "not ... a prayer or invocation but rather a giving of praise and honor to the Blessed Virgin Mary". The mistake medieval Christians made was to add requests to Mary that turned it into a prayer, such as the (in)famous words formalised at Trent in 1568:

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Luther urges that:

...we should make the Hail Mary neither a prayer nor an invocation because it is improper to interpret the words beyond what they mean in themselves and beyond the meaning given them by the Holy Spirit.

Instead, Luther commends a twofold approach to the Ave Maria:

First, we can use the Hail Mary as a meditation in which we recite what grace God has given her. Second, we should add a wish that everyone may know and respect her as one blessed by God.

Prof. Paul is less sympathetic to other Marian hymns such as the Salve Regina ("The Lutheran objects on so many grounds!"), and his Lutheran Rosary (PDF) provides less objectionable Marian material for use in personal devotion, such as the Magnificat, or Martin Luther's "Evangelical praise of the Mother of God":

O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, what great comfort God has shown us in you, by so graciously regarding your unworthiness and low estate. This encourages us to believe that henceforth He will not despise us poor and lowly ones, but graciously regard us also, according to your example.

Personally, while Prof. Paul makes a strong case for increased veneration of Mary among Lutherans, I still feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that we should adopt the use of the rosary or the Ave Maria, even in their "Lutheranised" (or "de-Papalised") forms.

There is a difference between occasionally addressing Mary in the second person as a form of "literary apostrophe" (as FDN put it in the comments to my first post), such as is found in certain hymns (see v.2), and directly addressing her, as someone who is listening to what we say, as part of our regular devotional life. Also, since the Reformation the Ave Maria and the rosary have acquired such specifically Roman Catholic connotations - and Roman Catholic doctrine and devotion in this area have become so much more extreme - that it seems next-to impossible to "reclaim" them (and is it even all that worthwhile doing so anyway?).

There is also a difference between giving an Evangelical interpretation to an existing practice (encouraging late-medieval Christians to treat the Ave Maria as "a meditation in which we recite what grace God has given her"), consistent with Luther's conservative approach to Reformation, and reviving a questionable (and optional) practice that has all-but died out in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

And part of me wonders whether such attempts to promote Marian devotion aren't just rooted in the pagan appeal highlighted by Dr Sasse. And perhaps Prof. Paul is just a lone maverick layman whose views should be treated with caution - takes one to know one, after all ;-) - though Pr Webber's imprimatur gives some comfort on that score.

But then, part of me wonders in turn whether my discomfort isn't just reflective of an unfounded hyper-Protestant prejudice against practices and beliefs that were held by the Lutheran Fathers during the Reformation and for many decades afterwards, as seems amply attested on Prof. Paul's website.

Any feedback on all this will be most welcome.

Some of you may be wondering why I've not made any mention of the UK General Election on my blog. Well, frankly it's all been too tedious and depressing to bother. And anyway, my vote on this occasion is, ahem, a private matter between myself and the ballot box (and anyone who's ever done any canvassing will know what that means).

So I'm with Clement Attlee, who, towards the end of the 1951 general election campaign, was respectfully asked by a BBC radio journalist whether "on this, the eve of a general election" he had any particular thoughts for the British people. He replied:

"No, not particularly."

Ah, that's the spirit.

Turn-out at the 1951 election was 82.6%, by the way. If the rather more voluble politicians of today can persuade as many as 60% of us to vote at all this time around, they'll be doing pretty well (turnout in 2001 was 59.4%, and this campaign has been even less inspiring than the last one).

The mood of the election campaign - with its heady mixture of voter apathy, collapsing car companies, concerns about voting fraud, negative personal attacks and wearisome haggling over tax and spending plans - has been perfectly summarised over the past few weeks by the Telegraph's cartoonist, Matt (the middle two are my personal favourites):

       

       

       
(Hat-tip to DS Ketelby for the Clem Attlee story).

In my previous post, we've seen how the Lutheran Confessions take a much less minimalist approach to the Blessed Virgin Mary than do, say, many evangelicals today. Mary is affirmed to be the Mother of God, and her "Ever-Virginity" is presented as (at the very least) a permissible "pious opinion" for Lutherans to hold.

This high view of Mary does not, however, lead us to accept the post-Reformation developments of Marian doctrine and devotion within Roman Catholicism. The 20th century Lutheran theologian, Dr Hermann Sasse, responded to the 1950 promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption with a letter to his fellow pastors in which he takes a very strong line against such theological innovations and the parallel expansion of Marian devotion.

He opens by noting the irony of how an action as divisive and schismatic as that papal proclamation does in fact demonstrate a deep underlying unity among Christians:

Time and again at various points in the history of the church, in spite of all the divisions, in spite of the confessional differences, which reach right to the heart of the faith, it becomes evident that some unity of Christianity does exist. The proclamation of the dogma of the bodily assumption Mary into heaven in the Apostolic Constitution "Munificentissimus Deus" of 1 November 1950 was felt as an event by all of Christianity, Roman and non-Roman alike, which affects all churches, and all Christians.

And it is quite right that this announcement should have had the impact it did, because it goes to the heart of the Reformation's (and, indeed, Orthodoxy's) disagreement with Rome. It presents all Christians with a choice that cannot be avoided:

For this dogma is either true or it is false. Either it really is "divinely revealed dogma, that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, after the completion of the course of her earthly life, was taken body and soul into heavenly glory," or this assertion is blasphemy against God.

This in turn gives us a stark choice about the nature of the Papacy:

Either it is actually the vicar of Christ who declares in this doctrinal assertion directed at all of Christianity that anyone who "denies or casts doubt," has defected from the "divine and Catholic faith," or the correct faith - who else could pronounce such a dogma as revealed by God and demand its acceptance at the cost of eternal life? - or it is the Antichrist who speaks here, the Antichrist who in this "last," "evil" time, the time in which Christianity on earth awaits the parousia of her Lord, has sat down in the temple of God, in the church of Christ, and seeks to deceive the faithful, and bring about apostasy from the correct faith. Tertium non datur ["There is no third way"].

Dr Sasse argues that the Marian cult arose following the adoption of Christianity as the official cult of the Roman Empire. As the previously pagan masses streamed into the church, "Mary, the apostles and martyrs took the place of the old gods". He points to the "religio-historical correspondence between the popular uprising in Acts 19:23ff and the scene at the Council of Ephesus": the Ephesian mob that ran through the streets after the condemnation of Nestorius, shouting "Thenemy of the Virgin is conquered!", consisted of the descendants of those who had, almost four centuries earlier, cried "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" for about four hours.

The Marian cult might not have proved such a problem had it merely been a Christian alternative to the pagan goddess cults. However, Sasse argues that it was more than this:

[U]nfortunately it was not only a Christian replacement for a pagan religion, it was likewise a pagan religion in Christian guise ... The Marian cult is Christianized paganism, a paganism which lives, closely bound up in a form of symbiosis with the Christian faith, and from which it draws ever-new power. It is as though the super-human powers which stand behind the pagan religions, after the collapse of the pagan cults and myths, had taken refuge in the Christian religion.

Dr Sasse does not deny that the Roman Catholic Church has many strengths: after all, as he points out, it is principally Protestant theologians who have been responsible for attacking historic Christian doctrines such as the virgin birth, the Incarnation and the Trinity.

But "the unspeakable tragedy of church history" is precisely that errors such as Mariolatry, the sacrifice of the Mass and the Papacy have arisen, "not merely in one confessional church which is separated from us", but in "the one holy church of God, which is indeed also there as certainly as the gospel and the sacraments of Christ are there". That is precisely what makes the Marian cult so dangerous and so powerful:

No pagan madonna cult outside of Christianity would concern us ... But a madonna cult in which the mother of the Lord is the madonna, is a power in the world ... As is the case in every church, so also the Roman Church does not live from her errors, but from her truths. The fearful thing in her history is this: these truths have been used to justify those errors.

Dr Sasse goes on to ask how the "Christianized paganism" of the Marian cult could have "forced its way into the church". He argues that it was the unbiblical parallel drawn by the early church between Christ as the "New Adam" and Mary as the "New Eve" that lies at the root of this:

That Christ is the New Adam is taught in the New Testament. But the New Testament knows nothing of a New Eve.

This concept of the "New Eve" has taken on a life of its own, and (as Dr Sasse could see as soon as the dogma of the Assumption was promulgated) has as its inevitable destination the declaration of Mary as "Co-Redemptrix" and "Mediatrix".

Finally Dr Sasse argues that there is an intimate link between the Marian cult and the Papacy, despite the fact that the Marian cult arose in the Christian East, which has always rejected Papal pretensions. This "deep connection" is the belief in the divinized man, the belief that man can be his own co-redeemer:

The doctrine of the Vicarius Christi and the infallible teaching office is an expression of that natural religion which ascribes to man that which can only be said of the God-man Jesus Christ. Therefore they both belong together, the corredemptrix and the Vicarius Christi, the Roman view of the Mary and of the pope.

So how are Lutherans to respond to all this? Dr Sasse argues that the first task of the Lutheran Church in this situation "is certainly rejection":

For what is said here is indeed said for the entirety of Christianity and for all times. The Roman Church must and will stand by this decision to the end of time. It is therefore quite appropriate that non-Roman Christianity speak very plainly what it has to say.

But there is also a need for the Lutheran Church and her leaders to remove "the log from their own eyes, namely that fearful laissez faire with which they face the loss of doctrine in their own church". "[T]he rejection of heresy is only the flip side of the confession of pure doctrine", Sasse argues, because:

How will one who does not confess the spiritual realities of the believing and confessing church of the gospel, which actually lives from the Word and Sacrament, face the powerful spiritual and intellectual realities of the Roman Church?

The closing words of Dr Sasse's letter make an interesting contrast with words that have been repeated a lot in recent days, "Habemus Papam", "we have a Pope". Instead, Dr Sasse declares:

Verbum solum habemus. We will hold to the Word of God.

Amen to that.

As for the rest of Dr Sasse's letter as summarised above, my view is that he explains with great clarity and force why the wrong type of devotion to Mary is indeed very, very wrong. But he doesn't really address the positive question of the right approach to take towards Mary.

As John Stott (I think) has written in a different context, "the answer to abuse is not non-use but right use". But Sasse's hard line would appear to rule out even the level of devotion to Mary practised by someone like Martin Luther, or even Zwingli and Calvin, all of whom retained the use of the Ave Maria in its pre-Reformation form (of which more in my next post).

Perhaps that should be ruled out, but it's a shame Sasse couldn't have addressed that issue more precisely rather than appearing to paint all forms of veneration towards the Blessed Virgin as "Christianized paganism".

Following on from my posts last week on Fatima (covering the good stuff and the other stuff), some posts looking at a range of Lutheran responses to the question of where the correct balance should lie between the "Marian maximalism" on display in my first Fatima post, and the "Marian minimalism" that leads many contemporary evangelicals to reject even the title "Mother of God" (and to feel uncomfortable referring to Mary even as "the Blessed Virgin").

It's worth pointing out from the start that I am not 100% clear myself where that balance should lie, which is one reason for this series of posts: I'm hoping that any feedback these posts get will help to develop my own thoughts on this subject.

First of all, a look at what the Lutheran Confessions have to say about Mary.

MOTHER OF GOD

The Confessions are absolutely clear on one point: it is appropriate to describe Mary as "the Mother of God":

[W]e believe, teach, and confess that Mary conceived and bore not a mere man and no more, but the true Son of God; therefore she also is rightly called and truly is the mother of God. (Epitome, VIII.12)

The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord expands on this statement:

Mary, the most blessed virgin, did not conceive a mere, ordinary human being, but a human being who is truly the Son of the most high God, as the angel testifies ... Therefore she is truly the mother of God ... (Solid Declaration, Article VIII)

Alert readers will have noticed some significant omissions from that paragraph: more on those later.

The point is that to deny that Mary is the Mother of God - by saying, for example, that she is instead merely the Mother of Christ, or "Christotokos" - is to deny the true union of the divine and human natures in Christ. In other words, to deny the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. This was declared a doctrine of the Christian church at the Council of Ephesus in 431 (though the concept dates from somewhat earlier):

If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy virgin is the mother of God (for she bore in a fleshly way the Word of God become flesh), let him be anathema.

EVER-VIRGIN?

More controversial is the question as to whether the Lutheran Confessions teach that Mary is/was "Ever-Virgin": that is, she remained a virgin for the rest of her life following the birth of Jesus.

The Smalcald Articles declare:

That the Son became man in this manner, that He was conceived, without the cooperation of man, by the Holy Ghost, and was born of the pure, holy [and always] Virgin Mary.

The words in square brackets are not present in the original, German version of the Smalcald Articles, but are included in the Latin text.

In the previous section, I quoted the Solid Declaration, Article VIII, with some omissions, which are now restored below in bold:

Mary, the most blessed virgin, did not conceive a mere, ordinary human being, but a human being who is truly the Son of the most high God, as the angel testifies. He demonstrated his divine majesty even in his mother's womb in that he was born of a virgin without violating her virginity. Therefore she is truly the mother of God and yet remained a virgin. (Formula of Concord [Solid Declaration], Article VIII)

The closing words, "and yet remained a virgin", translate the German "sie ist eine Jüngfrau geblieben". At the very least, this passage appears to affirm that Christ was born in a miraculous way that meant that Mary remained virgo intacta in a "physical" sense (the so-called "utero clauso", or closed-womb, argument).

As for what happened following the birth of Jesus, I have heard it suggested that a more natural translation of "sie ist eine Jüngfrau geblieben" would be, "she has remained a virgin". In other words, the Solid Declaration here affirms both the "utero clauso" and the "semper virgo".

The "utero clauso" crops up on one more occasion in the Solid Declaration, in a discussion of the various modes in which Christ can be present, which include:

...the incomprehensible, spiritual mode of presence according to which he neither occupies nor yields space but passes through everything created as he wills ... He employed this mode of presence when he left the closed grave and came through closed doors, in the bread and wine in the Supper, and, as people believe, when he was born from the most holy virgin Mary, his mother. (SD VII 99,100)

So it seems clear that the Lutheran Confessors believed that Jesus was born miraculously and that Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life. But does this mean that we are required to believe this today?

The most compelling argument against saying that the Confessions teach the perpetual virginity of Mary as binding doctrine (rather than as a "pious opinion") seems to be that these statements are not claiming to be a confession of Christian doctrine as taught by Scripture. The Confessions are not binding on us as regards opinions of history, science or even the precise interpretation of particular biblical texts: they are only binding on us as regards the doctrines taught by Scripture.

As Scripture is silent on the subject of Mary's perpetual virginity, then this is a matter not of Scriptural doctrine but of historical facts and the personal beliefs of our Reformers and Confessors. Thus the "Ever-Virgin" is valid as a "pious opinion" (one held by Luther, and even by John Calvin) but cannot be insisted upon as binding doctrine.

I find that quite a compelling argument, even though personally I find myself very sympathetic to the "pious opinion" that Mary "has remained" a virgin.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the position under the Lutheran Confessions is:

1. It is clearly believed, taught and confessed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church that Mary is the Mother of God. Denial of this scriptural doctrine is especially serious because it imperils the even greater doctrine which the doctrine of the Theotokos guards, namely the Incarnation of Christ, and particularly the personal union of His divine and human natures.
   


2. It is certainly legitimate, at the very least, for us to believe that Christ was born miraculously, and that Mary remained a Virgin after the birth of Christ. The argument is not as to whether Christians may believe that Mary is Ever-Virgin; the only question is whether they must do so, as binding Christian doctrine rather than merely pious opinion.
   

However, it is equally clear that the Confessions offer no justification for praying to Mary (or to any other saint), or for many other forms of Marian devotion. As Luther writes in the Smalcald Articles:

Although the angels in heaven pray for us (as Christ Himself also does), as also do the saints on earth, and perhaps also in heaven, yet it does not follow thence that we should invoke and adore the angels and saints, and fast, hold festivals, celebrate Mass in their honor, make offerings, and establish churches, altars, divine worship, and in still other ways serve them, and regard them as helpers in need [as patrons and intercessors], and divide among them all kinds of help, and ascribe to each one a particular form of assistance, as the Papists teach and do. For this is idolatry, and such honor belongs alone to God.

So those are the parameters as defined by the Lutheran Confessions: a confession that Mary is the Mother of God is obligatory; belief in her ever-virginity is permissible; prayer to her for help is forbidden. In the next couple of posts, I'll look at two very different Lutheran approaches within (?) those parameters.

An entertaining (and indeed moving) story of conversion under unpropitious circumstances, from Henry Chadwick's Early Church History (p.172):

In 441 the city prefect in Constantinople was a pagan poet from Panopolis in Egypt named Cyrus, who ... was exceedingly popular in the city and incurred the envy of the court eunuch Chrysaphius who engineered his downfall.

Cyrus saved himself by becoming a Christian, whereupon Chrysaphius had him despatched to be bishop of a delinquent Phrygian town where the excitable and rowdy populace had lynched four successive incumbents of the see.

Tough crowd, but Cyrus proved equal to the challenge:

Cyrus' sermons there were so brief (his first Christmas sermon consisted of one sentence) that he won the hearts of his turbulent flock.

Strangely, the experience produced a genuine faith. In 451, after Chrysaphius' fall, Cyrus abandoned his orders and resumed secular rank at Constantinople, where he became famed for his generosity to the poor and for his intimate friendship with the nearby pillar saint, Daniel the Stylite, who became his spiritual director.

Not the first person to make this point during the past few days, but Mark Steyn does so with typical gusto:

Apparently, the New York Times was stunned that their short list of Cardinal Gloria Steinem, Cardinal Rupert Everett and Cardinal Rosie O'Donnell were defeated at the last moment by some guy who came out of left field and isn't even gay or female but instead belongs to the discredited "Catholic" faction of the Catholic Church.

But he goes on to make a more serious, and perceptive, point:

Unlike the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the conclave of cardinals takes its job seriously. They understand the demands of the New York Times: women priests, gay sex, condoms for all. But, as befits an ancient institution, they take the long view: They think that radical secularism is weak and that the consequences of its weakness will prove dangerous and possibly fatal for the Western world. Therefore, there's no point accommodating it -- and, after all, those churches that do (the Episcopalians, for example) are already in steep decline.

create your own visited country map
Just zooming in a little:


create your personalized map of europe
But to be fair, this map can't reflect the fact that I did visit East Germany, pre-1989, which has to be worth something. Great fun - had a gun pointed at me by a border guard after we took the wrong turn down the motorway, played the organ in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and got the words "Küche" and "Kuchen" mixed up so I asked for "a slice of kitchen" in a cafe - happy days.

Oh, and my father had to throw the rest of his black market Ostmarks into a bin in a motorway parking area, since we wouldn't be able to convert them back to Deutschmarks at the border - seeing a Yorkshireman literally throw his money away is a pretty rare sight, I can tell you.

Hat-tip to Theresa.

Pimlico, yesterday

A friend of mine has just moved to Pimlico, which was sufficient excuse to send him, and post here, the following gem from GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. As so often with GKC, the whimsy cannot altogether hide what a profound point he is making:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful.

The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck.

If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Christopher Howse's "Sacred Mysteries" column this week looks at the possibility of reunion between the Roman Catholic Church and Lutherans under Pope Benedict XVI:

According to John Allen, the American Vatican-watcher who has kept an eye on Joseph Ratzinger for the past few years and written his biography (Cardinal Ratzinger, Continuum), the Pope's greatest hopes are for talks on Christian unity with the Lutherans, who number about 60 million.

Howse bases this on the "great break-through" made in 1998, with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which includes the following statement:

"By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not by any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping us and calling us to good works."

"It almost seemed as if Luther need never have broken with Rome," comments Howse, before going on to describe how the agreement nearly foundered later that year over disagreements as to what the text actually meant, and the role played by Cardinal Ratzinger in putting the agreement back on track:

On November 3, 1998, Ratzinger called a meeting of Lutherans and Catholics at the house of his brother Georg ... at Regensburg in Bavaria.

According to the Lutheran theologian, Joachim Track, Ratzinger made three concessions that saved the agreement from collapse (including a declaration that justification and final judgment were God's gracious acts).

Howse concludes:

If this incident showed Cardinal Ratzinger as an altogether more open and conciliatory figure than the fierce enforcer depicted by his opponents, his actions as pope will be watched almost as keenly by Christians outside his jurisdiction as by the flock of this German Shepherd.

But is it really true to say that the statement set out above from the Joint Declaration means that "Luther need never have broken with Rome"? Were the additional points agreed at Regensburg really "concessions" by the Roman Catholic Church?

For some helpful analysis as to why the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod and other confessional Lutherans (such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, though I concede our rejection is unlikely to keep the new Pope awake at night) rejected the Unconditional Surrender of the Doctrine of Justification Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, there is a helpful FAQ on the subject on the LCMS's website. This begins:

The recently signed Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) does not signal a change in the Roman Catholic church, but rather, a willingness on the part of the Lutherans who signed it to allow Rome's doctrine of justification to stand as a valid interpretation of what the Bible teaches us about justification. This is something that the Lutheran church has never done before, and in fact, it is a great tragedy and a profoundly sad moment in the history of Lutheranism.

The important point is that there is nothing surprising, radical or "concessionary" about Rome agreeing that we are saved by grace and not by our good works:

Rome historically has always taught that we are saved by grace, and grace alone. They emphasize that very strongly. The 16th century Council of Trent makes this point very clear. Thus, there is nothing new on this in the Declaration on this point, even though some Lutherans have made it sound as if Rome's words about grace signal some marvelous breakthrough.

Instead, the document relies on "constructive ambiguity" to achieve agreement, with a careful avoidance of any "precise definitions of the words grace, faith, sin, etc.", which would in fact have shown how far apart the two confessions remain.

Take, for example, the ringing declaration that we are saved "by grace alone". Sounds great: but what do we mean by grace? The FAQ argues that:

[Roman Catholics] view grace as a sort of "substance" that God infuses into us that permits us to do those works that are necessary in order that we might earn more grace. The Bible describes grace as the loving and favorable disposition of God; in other words, grace is all about what God is doing and giving.

Similarly, our definitions of justification differ:

In the Roman Catholic view, justification is a process by which we participate with God in achieving our salvation. The Biblical view is that justification is God's declaration of our complete righteousness and total forgiveness, apart from any works. This gift is received by faith alone - apart from works.

In short, there is no real agreement here: simply statements to which Roman Catholics can say, "We agree with this (using our definitions of the terms involved)", and Lutherans likewise can say, "We agree with this (using our definitions of those terms)".

That said, I am still intrigued by suggestions that, in the 1980s, Ratzinger was contemplating declaring the Augsburg Confession to be "a Catholic document" (whatever that might mean). I'd be interested to know if anyone else has more information on this: the only source I can find for it comes from reports on the Joint Declaration (such as this story from the National Catholic Reporter's archives).

Interesting perspective on the papal election from Frank Johnson in this week's Spectator, who argues that In Rome this week conservativism triumphed over authoritarianism (paid registration necessary, alas - curse these free-market economics!). Johnson writes:

Irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, or will be good or bad, the cardinals’ choice of pope is an act of defiance unique in our time. We are encouraged to believe that the papal conclave was authoritarian. In reality, with its choice of Cardinal Ratzinger, it defied authority. Authority, in modern conditions, is invariably liberal.

Johnson continues:

I share the liberal view about the malign consequences of John Paul II and the Roman Catholic Church in such matters as abortion, contraception and Aids in Africa. But I am not a Roman Catholic. I would hesitate to impose my own run-of-the-mill liberalism about such topics on a force so distant from it as the Roman Catholic Church.

"English Tories should understand this," he argues. Tories often reduce everything to economics, but "there must still be a residual Toryism shrinking from an arid world in which we were utilitarian and rational about what should be numinous. Otherwise we might all as well be Blairites".

He continues:

It is the aridity, and lack of a sense of the world's mystery, that is depressing about, say, the liberal press or the otherwise informative Channel 4 News. There, every public figure or institution is judged according to how he or she conforms to the average London media figure.

"Did many faces fall?" Channel 4 News's presenter Mr Jon Snow asked the programme's man in Rome just after the identity of the new Pope was disclosed to the world. Not "Did many faces rise?" For Media Person, faces do not rise at news of conservative triumph.

Google now records 1,610,000 hits for "pope benedict XVI", a search string that didn't exist until last Tuesday (2,240,000 for just "benedict XVI").

That compares with 1,620,000 hits for the string "Archbishop of Canterbury", an office that has been in existence since AD 597.

It just goes to demonstrate the immense power of an international institution that provokes ferocious loyalty from its countless millions of adherents. But enough about Google...

RC Sproul, Jr thinks that Christian women shouldn't blog about theology. But as Michael Spencer observes, we're not living in Iran... yet.

I think RC Jr misunderstands the nature of blogging. The New Testament forbids women from exercising teaching authority over men in the church. However, blogging isn't (or at least shouldn't be) about exercising teaching authority - otherwise RC Jr's fatwa would apply equally to blogging laymen (such as your correspondent).

As I've written before, blogging is more akin to CS Lewis' comment about how "two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can" (see my post, "One blogger telling another where to find bread"). But then, CS Lewis - who stressed time and time again in his writings that he was merely a layman, not a theologian - would no doubt also come under RC Jr's prohibition on laypeople implicitly laying claim to teaching authority by writing about theology.

Undoubtedly there can be dangers in this sort of "peer to peer theology", but these are dangers that arise in any context where laypeople discuss theology: for example, the danger of plausible-sounding ideas taking hold among people who lack the training to recognise them as being, in fact, long-dismissed heresies. However, the answer to this is better catechising from our pastors, not the abolition of Christian conversation, whether online or off.

The title to this post, by the way, is a reference to a classic TV comedy sketch by Harry Enfield: a 1930s public information film - "Look, Listen and Take Heed" - in which Mr Myles Cholmondley-Warner (Cholmondley being pronounced, as it is needless to remind people, "Chumley") speaks on the subject of "Women! Know your limits!". The film features a woman who embarrasses herself and humiliates her husband at a dinner party by daring to express a view on the Gold Standard.

The correct behaviour for a woman is then demonstrated in a re-run of the same scene, when the woman this time restricts herself to a simpering, "Oh, I don't know anything about the Gold Standard, I'm afraid - but I do love little kittens. They're so soft, and furry." :-)

My previous post set out extracts from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 2000 paper on The Message of Fatima that I personally found very alarming. I try to steer away from polemical labels, but if the "prayer" set out in that post doesn't qualify as "Mariolatry", then I wonder what would qualify (and I say that as someone whose attitude towards the Blessed Virgin Mary - or the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, as I like to call her ;-) - is not necessarily as reductive as may be the case for some Protestants).

But the reason for posting that was not to engage in "Papist-bashing", but to set the scene for the "Theological Commentary" at the end of that paper, contributed by one Josef, Cardinal Ratzinger. This commentary is very good stuff indeed: quite apart from the content of what he is saying, there is a considerable aesthetic pleasure and privilege in seeing such a brilliant and incisive mind in action. Turning from the preceding pages of the Fatima document to this commentary is like pushing your way through a particularly exuberant procession on a stiflingly-hot August 15th festival somewhere in southern Europe, into the air-conditioned foyer of an international five-star hotel.

From the opening words of the commentary, you know you're dealing with something of a quite different nature from what has gone before. Ratzinger opens:

A careful reading of the text of the so-called third "secret" of Fatima ... will probably prove disappointing or surprising after all the speculation it has stirred. No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled. We see the Church of the martyrs of the century which has just passed represented in a scene described in a language which is symbolic and not easy to decipher.

Is this what the Mother of the Lord wished to communicate to Christianity and to humanity at a time of great difficulty and distress? Is it of any help to us at the beginning of the new millennium? Or are these only projections of the inner world of children, brought up in a climate of profound piety but shaken at the same time by the tempests which threatened their own time? How should we understand the vision? What are we to make of it?

In the first part of his commentary, Ratzinger addresses the distinction between "public Revelation" and "private revelations". His thoughts on this are in many respects barely distinguishable from the likes of John Stott, JI Packer and other conservative evangelicals on the subject of charismatic phenomena: it's not that they flat-out reject such things (as would cessationists), but such phenomena must be made firmly subordinate to the final revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Ratzinger describes "public Revelation" as follows (bold emphasis added, here as throughout this post):

In Christ, God has said everything, that is, he has revealed himself completely, and therefore Revelation came to an end with the fulfilment of the mystery of Christ as enunciated in the New Testament.

This doesn't mean that theology today consists simply of parroting old formulas. Revelation remains the same, but our understanding of that Revelation deepens and grows over time:

...even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made fully explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.

This then provides a context in which we can "understand rightly the concept of 'private revelation', which refers to all the visions and revelations that have taken place since the completion of the New Testament", and of which (Ratzinger argues) the message of Fatima is one example.

The crucial distinction between private revelation and public Revelation is the ability to bind consciences:

The authority of private revelations is essentially different from that of the definitive public Revelation. The latter demands faith; in it in fact God himself speaks to us through human words and the mediation of the living community of the Church ... Private revelation is a help to this faith, and shows its credibility precisely by leading me back to the definitive public Revelation...

Such a message can be a genuine help in understanding the Gospel and living it better at a particular moment in time; therefore it should not be disregarded. It is a help which is offered, but which one is not obliged to use.

Thus, private revelation must be assessed by reference to the final and unalterable public Revelation:

The criterion for the truth and value of a private revelation is therefore its orientation to Christ himself. When it leads us away from him, when it becomes independent of him or even presents itself as another and better plan of salvation, more important than the Gospel, then it certainly does not come from the Holy Spirit, who guides us more deeply into the Gospel and not away from it.

Following a consideration of some psychological and anthropological issues, Ratzinger then turns to the "secret" of Fatima itself (the "scare-quotes" are his, by the way). And here he makes a very, very revealing statement. Having argued that the essence of the first two parts of the "secret" is concerned with pointing the children to the goal of "the salvation of your souls" (1 Peter 1:9), he goes on to say:

To reach this goal, the way indicated - surprisingly for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural world - is devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about his own personal attitude towards all this? I confess I almost laughed out loud and punched the air in delight when reading this - but managed to restrain myself, for fear of alarming the other people on my train.

Ratzinger continues with an "explanation" of what "devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary" means:

According to Matthew 5:8, the "immaculate heart" is a heart which, with God's grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore "sees God". To be "devoted" to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means therefore to embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiat - your will be done - the defining centre of one's whole life.

Now, if that's what being devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary does mean - if really it's all just a metaphor for how we should emulate Mary as an example of faith and obedience - then that's sort of OK, I suppose. But the sort of language being used in the Act of Entrustment described in my previous post went way beyond this. Is Cardinal Ratzinger explaining devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or explaining it away?

Anyway, Ratzinger develops this argument - that whatever the meaning and significant of the message of Fatima, ultimately it boils down to "nothing new to see here; move along, move along" - further in his conclusion:

What is the meaning of the "secret" of Fatima as a whole (in its three parts)? What does it say to us? ... Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of the "secret": the exhortation to prayer as the path of "salvation for souls" and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion.

As for the "justly famous" phrase, "my Immaculate Heart will triumph", Ratzinger explains this (away) as follows (bold emphasis added):

The Heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Saviour into the world - because, thanks to her Yes, God could become man in our world and remains so for all time.

The Evil One has power in this world, as we see and experience continually; he has power because our freedom continually lets itself be led away from God. But since God himself took a human heart and has thus steered human freedom towards what is good, the freedom to choose evil no longer has the last word. From that time forth, the word that prevails is this: "In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world" (Jn 16:33). The message of Fatima invites us to trust in this promise.

Taken in itself, much of this commentary is pretty cracking stuff. Not all is how Evangelicals in the Augsburg sense would choose to express it ("prayer as the path of 'salvation for souls'", "penance"); I'm suspicious of the emphasis placed on Mary's human "Yes" as what meant that God "could" become man in our world; and no doubt Ratzinger would take a different view from Evangelicals (whether in the Augsburg, or any other, sense) on what exactly constitutes the "public Revelation" to which he refers. But nevertheless, this is a very impressive document, and almost manages to be persuasive.

But then you shake yourself, and like Puddleglum you stamp on the fire to stop its seductive aroma overcoming your senses (and your objections) completely. Much of what Cardinal Ratzinger was saying here was all well and good, but it has a distinct air of "spin" about it. As noted above, the "prayers" quoted in my previous post went way beyond being some kind of metaphor for the need to follow Mary in our own obedience to God and pursuit of salvation. Indeed, they bore every resemblance to something that "leads us away from [Christ]", something that "becomes independent of him or even presents itself as another and better plan of salvation, more important than the Gospel" (just look at how little reference to Christ there was in those "prayers").

So perhaps what this tour de force from Cardinal Ratzinger really demonstrates is one of the dangers, spiritually, of intellectual brilliance like Ratzinger's: its ability to rationalise the wholly irrational, and to justify the wholly unjustifiable. To miss the wood for the trees; to strain out gnats while swallowing the camel.

Ratzinger demonstrates that you can force the wildest extremes of Marian devotion into a more orthodox mould, if you try hard enough, and if you are as clever as, well, as Pope Benedict XVI. But that doesn't mean you should.

In my post on Tuesday on the new Pope, I mentioned an item I had found on the Vatican website recently about The Message of Fatima, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in April 2000.

The "secret of Fatima" - the prophetic message given, we are told, by the Blessed Virgin Mary to the children to whom she appeared at Fatima in 1917 - has apparently given rise to all sorts of whacked-out conspiracy theories and sedevacantist paranoia, which I'm not planning to go into here. The "third secret", which allegedly predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, was not disclosed until this document's release in 2000.

There are two main aspects to this document that intrigued me. Firstly, the description of how Pope John Paul II read the "third secret" following the attempt on his life and responded by "consecrating the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary". Secondly, the radically different tone of (the then) Cardinal Ratzinger's "Theological Commentary" at the end of the document.

Firstly, the Immaculate Heart thing. Here's an excerpt from the Pope's recorded address played at an "Act of Entrustment" in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major on 7 June 1981 (emphasis in original):

Mother of all individuals and peoples, you know all their sufferings and hopes. In your motherly heart you feel all the struggles between good and evil, between light and darkness, that convulse the world: accept the plea which we make in the Holy Spirit directly to your heart, and embrace with the love of the Mother and Handmaid of the Lord those who most await this embrace, and also those whose act of entrustment you too await in a particular way. Take under your motherly protection the whole human family, which with affectionate love we entrust to you, O Mother. May there dawn for everyone the time of peace and freedom, the time of truth, of justice and of hope.

On 25 March 1984, Pope John Paul II followed this with a "prayer" in St Peter's Square that "entrusted all men and women and all peoples to the Immaculate Heart of Mary" (Hello? What's this "all"? Was I at that meeting?).

I'm sorry if this offends any Roman Catholic readers, but this is really alarming stuff. Every justification I've ever heard from Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christians for seeking the intercession of the saints is that it is merely analogous to asking our fellow Christians in the Church Militant to pray for us. Guess I was misinformed, as this is something else entirely (again, all emphasis is in the original):

Above all creatures, may you be blessed, you, the Handmaid of the Lord, who in the fullest way obeyed the divine call!

Hail to you, who are wholly united to the redeeming consecration of your Son!

Mother of the Church! Enlighten the People of God along the paths of faith, hope, and love! Enlighten especially the peoples whose consecration and entrustment by us you are awaiting. Help us to live in the truth of the consecration of Christ for the entire human family of the modern world.

In entrusting to you, O Mother, the world, all individuals and peoples, we also entrust to you this very consecration of the world, placing it in your motherly Heart.

Immaculate Heart! Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects already weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths towards the future!

From famine and war, deliver us.

From nuclear war, from incalculable self-destruction, from every kind of war, deliver us.

From sins against the life of man from its very beginning, deliver us.

From hatred and from the demeaning of the dignity of the children of God, deliver us.

From every kind of injustice in the life of society, both national and international, deliver us.

From readiness to trample on the commandments of God, deliver us.

From attempts to stifle in human hearts the very truth of God, deliver us.

From the loss of awareness of good and evil, deliver us.

From sins against the Holy Spirit, deliver us, deliver us.

Accept, O Mother of Christ, this cry laden with the sufferings of all individual human beings, laden with the sufferings of whole societies.

Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer all sin: individual sin and the 'sin of the world', sin in all its manifestations.

Let there be revealed, once more, in the history of the world the infinite saving power of the Redemption: the power of merciful Love! May it put a stop to evil! May it transform consciences! May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of Hope!".

Good grief. For some reason, Acts 10:25,26 springs to mind here:

When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, "Stand up; I too am a man."

Or, for that matter, how about the Magnificat, which at least we can be sure really does come from Mary herself:

He has shown strength with his arm;
     He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
     and exalted those of humble estate...

"Mother of the Church ... from every kind of injustice in the life of society, both national and international, deliver us"? You're talking to the wrong person, dude.

The document then continues to set out the wording of the third secret, which claimed that only such an act of consecration of the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary could restore Christianity to Russia (and, by implication, destroy Communism) and bring peace to the world.

What is interesting about this is the strong link made between the achievement for which Pope John Paul II is most revered by non-Roman Catholics - his contribution to the downfall of Communism - and his devotion to Mary that is probably the tendency many of us most deplored (and yes, I'm well aware that, from a Roman Catholic perspective, there is quite a simple explanation for this!).

The document doesn't quite say in so many words that this "Act of Entrustment" is what brought about the end of Communism, but that's the clear implication. The first part of the document concludes:

The decision of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to make public the third part of the "secret" of Fatima brings to an end a period of history marked by tragic human lust for power and evil, yet pervaded by the merciful love of God and the watchful care of the Mother of Jesus and of the Church.

This is then followed by various facsimile documents, transcripts of the three "secrets", etc.

So, where does Cardinal Ratzinger come in to all this? Well, that's for the next post. Let's just say it's quite a striking contrast.

Well, I guess I called it right yesterday with my predictions as to the general tone of media coverage (The Independent: "perhaps the most controversial, divisive and reactionary of all the plausible candidates". You've got to love that "perhaps").

Listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning (too early to hear their interview with the new Pope), you could be forgiven for thinking Pope Benedict XVI had already proved something of a flop. I'm always a little hazy at that time in the morning, so my recollection may not be wholly reliable here, but the words "tepid" and "lukewarm" seemed to come up an awful lot in reports on the reaction to his election.

It was therefore something of a shock to read the Telegraph's front page report this morning and to find that its reporters had clearly been in a different St Peter's Square to some other journalists:

To tumultuous cheers and applause, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, one of the most controversial figures in the modern Church, emerged on to the balcony of St Peter's yesterday as the 265th Pope.

In extraordinary scenes, the new leader of the world's one billion Roman Catholics immediately won the hearts of the tens of thousands of flag-waving pilgrims packed into the square by anointing his predecessor, John Paul II, as "great".

Speaking tearfully to chants of "Viva il Papa", he said: "Dear brothers and sisters, after the great John Paul II the cardinals have chosen a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of Our Lord."

And so on.

Charles Moore then contributes an opinion piece that is well worth reading in its entirety. He begins:

For the past 25 years, a meeting took place each week which defied the history of the 20th century. A Pole and a German met in peace to discuss the will of God. Every Friday, Pope John Paul II, the Pole, sat with Josef Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, alone. Now the Pole is dead, and the German is Pope.

He goes on to discuss why "this learned man, the theologian who debated with John Paul, the philosopher" has chosen the name Benedict. The choice has been most immediately linked with the previous Pope Benedict, who reigned during the First World War.

But Moore argues persuasively that the choice owes more to St Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, whose Rule "laid the foundations, Ratzinger believes, for the methods of democracy", and whose "spiritual spark kept the light of Christianity alive through centuries of darkness":

"Think of late antiquity," Ratzinger once told an interviewer. "Where St Benedict probably wasn't noted at all. He was also a dropout who came from noble Roman society and did something bizarre, something that later turned out to be the 'ark on which the West survived'."

A further quote from Ratzinger is one that all Christians, particularly Lutherans (with our temptations to succumb to "generic evangelicalism" on one side and theological liberalism on the other), should take to heart:

The answer to the question of our time, the new Pope believes, may be to challenge the spirit of that time: "The Church can be contemporary by being anti-contemporary." He is stern, yes; obscurantist, no.

Moore also has some wonderful insights into Ratzinger the man, for which you'll just have to read his article. He closes with a description of how Ratzinger "takes inspiration from the chance that he was born on Easter Eve":

"I find that a very good day, which... hints at my conception of history and my own situation; on the threshold of Easter but not yet through the door."

On one level, Lutherans shouldn't care who holds the office of Pope. And there can be little doubt that Pope Benedict XVI will be as zealous as his predecessor in upholding Roman Catholic errors in all the usual areas (justification, Mariology etc), though by all accounts he may backpedal the more recent tendencies towards universalism.

However, we shouldn't ignore the fact that a liberalising Pope of the "Vatican III" persuasion would have had the potential to cause incalculable damage to the church outside the Papacy. As I've said before, if Rome adopts the ordination of women (albeit unthinkable under JP II's immediate successor, however liberal) then the last hold-outs - particularly the Evangelical Lutheran Church - would almost inevitably find themselves going down the same path.

The good news about Pope Benedict XVI is that he will continue to be strong where the Roman Catholic Church is at its best: on Trinitarian orthodoxy and moral issues, for example. Even on the redeeming work of Christ, for all that this can be obscured by other teachings (penance, purgatory, the intercession of the saints etc). In other words, all the bits in the Catechism of the Catholic Church where you find yourself saying, "This is really good stuff! What a shame about ... the other bits".

I may also try to blog at some point on a fascinating page I found on the Vatican website about the secrets of Fatima, to which Cardinal Ratzinger made a very interesting, and perhaps revealing, contribution.

Plus, we can all now sit back and enjoy the spectacle of certain sections of the media rerunning their stories about Paul Wolfowitz taking over at the World Bank, replacing references to Wolfowitz with "Pope Benedict" and references to the World Bank with "Roman Catholic Church". (You know the sort of thing: "Liberal dismay/anger as ultra-conservative appointed...").

A useful tip for all those thousands of Firefox users wishing to access the website of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, but put off by the horror that is that site's excessive use of the infamous <blink> tag.

Simply go to about:config, scroll down to the "browser.blink_allowed" attribute, and double-click it so it reads "false". Then you can return to the ELCE's home page, and enjoy the site without the page titles making you feel slightly ill.

All part of the service. ;-)

Update: I'm afraid Internet Explorer users (who still, inexplicably, account for the majority of visitors to this site) don't have a dog in this race. IE ignores the "blink" tag, which was (if memory serves) a Netscape "proprietary extension" back in the days of the "browser wars". That's why it came as such a shock to visit the ELCE site for the first time since switching to Firefox and see... that.

As Pr McCain points out, the individuals holding the office of Pope have not always been, how can I put this, men of impressive sanctity. As Michael Farquhar puts it in the Washington Post article posted by Pr McCain, "in some of the most colorful elections of the past, the Holy Spirit seems to have taken a holiday".

Well, maybe. But one prominent cardinal - George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney - has a different explanation. It turns out the Holy Spirit wasn't on holiday when the likes of Rodrigo Borgia bribed his way to the papal throne - He was just having an off day:

GEORGE NEGUS: Cardinal, I don’t mean this in a facetious or a sacrilegious way, but how does the Holy Spirit guide people like yourself in the conclave when there has to be politics involved, there has to be ideology involved, there has to be numbers involved, is the Holy Spirit a good political numbers man?

CARDINAL GEORGE PELL: No, sometimes He gets it right, sometimes He gets it wrong. But the Holy Spirit always works through free individuals. We try to listen to one another, we try to think, we try to discern what the church needs and to come to some consensus. The Holy Spirit only works through humans and through natural means generally. I’ve received no special inspiration.

GEORGE NEGUS: It’s interesting though you said sometimes the Holy Spirit can get it wrong?

CARDINAL GEORGE PELL: Yes, well there have been bad popes in history.

I'm lost for words.

Hat-tip to Couldn't Help Noticing.

The BBC reports on the latest IT security scare: malicious blogs that are "used as traps that infect visitor's machines with keylogging software or viruses".

The idea is that, rather than waiting for people to stumble upon the site by accident, an email is sent out that aims to drum up business for the site as if it were a legitimate (if irritatingly pushy) blog.

The BBC report concludes:

Users were urged to keep anti-virus and patches up to date, regularly scan machines with anti-spyware products and exercise caution when reading unsolicited messages sent via e-mail or instant messenger.

Yada yada yada. What the BBC is unable to do, however, is end its item with a simple:


 

Cracking quote, Gromit:

Thus, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, "Who are you? When and whence do you come? As you are none of mine, what are you doing on my property? Indeed, Marcion, by what right do you hew my wood? By whose permission, Valentinus, are you diverting my streams? By what power, Apelles, are you removing my landmarks? This is my property.

"Why are you, the rest, sowing and pasturing here at your own pleasure? This is my property. I have long possessed it; I possessed it before you. I hold sure title-deeds from the original owners themselves, to whom the estate belonged. I am the heir of the apostles. Just as they disposed of it by their will, and committed it to a trust, and adjured the trustees, even so do I hold it. As for you, they have, it is certain, always held you as disinherited, and rejected you as outsiders, as enemies."

 - Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 37, quoted in A New Eusebius, p.169.

Great stuff. "Tell it like it is, brother!" (and, for these purposes, let's not hold it against Tertullian that he later skidded off the road a bit himself).

The notes point out that the comments about particular heretics are very specifically chosen: Marcion the "wood-hewer" excised from Scripture (Tertullian says he "used the knife, not the pen", while Valentinus perverted the meaning of Scripture ("diverting my streams").

And Tertullian's complaint about the heretics trespassing on Scriptures that properly belong to the Christian Church is reminiscent of the following passage from Dr Hermann Sasse, which I have quoted before:

[T]here is no denying that in this sinful world Scripture can also be misunderstood and misused ... As soon as there was a New Testament it was commandeered by all the heretics. Today we share the same Bible with the worst of the sects. The true church is gathered not around Scripture but around the rightly understood, the purely and correctly interpreted Bible.

What a shame that Luther didn't nail his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Trade Mark Office. Trademarking the name "Lutheran" might have avoided this sort of thing: Lutheran Bishops Mull Allowing Gay Clergy.

It calls to mind that scene in The Naked Gun, where the operatic tenor Enrico Palazzo watches, bound and gagged, weeping with rage and frustration, as he witnesses Frank Drebbin murdering the Star-Spangled Banner on national television, while the caption proclaims the tone-deaf singer to be "ENRICO PALAZZO".

For further discussion of the history and (un)suitability of using the name "Lutheran" to describe the Church of the Augsburg Confession, see Beggars All.

My personal $0.02 on the idea of dropping the name "Lutheran"? However unsatisfactory the name may be in principle, rebrands of this type rarely turn out well - especially when a familiar name is replaced by one that needs even more explanation than the old ("evangelical catholic", "Church of the Augsburg Confession").

I'm sure it didn't occur to Enrico Palazzo to change his name: he just made sure he sang so well in future that no-one could mistake him for an impostor.

A couple of interesting articles in the Saturday's Telegraph on the subject of the papacy. Damien Thompson wrote a fascinating piece on the Roman Catholic Church's delight and astonishment at how the British Establishment - past and present political leaders, the Royal Family, the Archbishop of Canterbury - have lined up to honour Pope John Paul II (Fr Michael Seed: "It was like a miracle ... This is a time of God's blessing on the earth").

His article includes some entertaining thoughts on Cherie Blair's mantilla ("Is Cherie wearing what I think she's wearing?" "Good God. I haven't seen a mantilla for 20 years") before going on to explain the "innocent and rather sweet reason" why she chose to wear an item of clothing that is "the equivalent of a modern City banker sporting a bowler hat". He then goes on to provide some insightful comments on why people shouldn't be getting too carried away by the events of the past week (emphasis added):

[T]he strange death of Protestant England, and what the historian Mark Almond calls "the hollowing-out of the Protestant Succession", is emphatically not the same thing as the rebirth of Catholicism.

Cardinal Hume discovered this when he incautiously talked about "the conversion of England", and then spent the next decade watching his churches empty. Mass attendance will be higher than usual tomorrow, but will quickly revert to its disastrously low level.

A better clue to this week's Mediterranean-style outpourings is a saying attributed to G K Chesterton - that when people cease to believe in something, they do not believe in nothing: they believe in anything. The death of the Pope, like the death of Diana, has briefly satisfied a spiritual hunger that feeds off emotion and spectacle rather than doctrine.

Then Charles Moore contributes an opinion piece based on a comment made by Rocco Buttiglione when he was asked to explain why so many young people seemed to love the Pope:

He said that nowadays we find ourselves stuck in "a Kingdom of Boredom" and that the young, in particular, resented this: the Pope had shown them a way out of this kingdom.

Moore suggests that "Republic of Boredom" is a better phrase, since it has no single monarch. But, he continues:

Whatever the precise, formal constitution of boredom, it is certainly a tyranny. "Boredom", indeed, is a fairly modern word, and describes an essentially modern phenomenon.

It means more than the lack of variety and excitement that has characterised many, perhaps most, lives throughout history. It means the mood that comes from pointlessness.

Its symptoms are manifested in a variety of ways:

...at airports, in screens in bars which no one is watching, in channel-hopping, in shopping malls ... in astrology, in talking about football because you think you're supposed to, in Big Brother, in waiting for the results of the National Lottery, in recreational drugs and binge-drinking, in the devout political/commercial belief that no one has an attention span of more than 20 seconds, and, to be honest, in a great deal of feeble religious liturgy...

Boredom seeps through government press releases ("transparent", "accessible", "commitment to stakeholders") and innumerable advertisements. It is in the free magazine you are offered at Tube stations, the mission statement sent by public companies to all shareholders, the spam e-mails and pop-ups on our computers.

In short, "Every day, hundreds of messages confront us with the triviality of our own wants and invent more that we didn't know we had". Young people are particularly vulnerable to this tyranny of boredom, "because advertisers and politicians regard them as persuadable", and due to the requirement on them to be cool: "the most coercive of all 21st-century social pressures".

Pope John Paul II's genius, Moore suggests, was to see how "the medium that is so often the arch-priest in the Kingdom of Boredom, the television", could be used to assail that same Kingdom "to the ends of the earth".

I think Moore overstates his case when he suggests the cries of "Santo! Santo" from the millions gathered in Rome represent the first stirrings of a revolution against the Republic of Boredom. My vote is with Damien Thompson and the "Diana effect". We have, after all, been here before: does anyone else remember "the death of irony" after 9/11?

But that phrase, "the Republic of Boredom", is a great reminder of the enemy the Gospel faces both inside and outside the church. A number of people have remarked in recent months on the decline of atheism in the West. But in many cases it has been replaced by "apatheism": people just couldn't care less whether God is there, or what He is like if He does exist.

And inside the church, what CS Lewis called our "horror of the same old thing" is a continual problem (see Charles Moore's reference to "feeble religious liturgy"). As Lewis put it:

I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".

Just to have a quick blow on my own trumpet... thank you to all those visitors who made last week the busiest ever on this blog. For the first time ever the number of unique visits passed a thousand, ending up at 1,203, with last Monday achieving the highest number of visits for a day, at 281. Watch out, Slashdot!