Fr. Joseph O'Leary's "New Gospel"

Sheeesh! Seems my blog has turned into a bully pulpit for a liberal Irish priest in Tokyo named Fr. Joseph O'Leary (pictured left), who has more time on his hands than he knows what to do with. Just examine the Comments to any one of the recent posts below, and you'll see what I mean. About 95% of all the comments are his. I ought to start charging him a user tax!

Sincerely, I am amazed at the quantity of time his 'apostolate' permits him to spend pouring fourth avelanches of opinion, ideology, theory, and general dissent in commentary on our posts. I suppose he believes he's helping to enlighten those of us stuck in the "bloodless categories" of an "ossified" and "archaic" "scholastic" Catholic orthodoxy. Clearly he's a very erudite and learned priest. He spent some time at Duquesne University when I was in graduate school there in another lifetime. Perhaps his motives cannot be faulted. Still, the sheer quantity of time and energy he spends in this forum is amazing, to say the least.

I concur with 'New Catholic' (the author of a comment) who finds Fr. O'Leary's recent statement that "the anger of a Joan Chittester is Christ-like anger" amusing, though I am no more surprised by it than his celebration of Martin Luther's thought on his own new website. St. Thomas Aquinas says that "the praise of courage depends on the justice involved." Likewise, with the praise of anger as "Christ-like." Of course I know he is assuming the "justice" of Chittester's cause. But by any canon of traditional Catholicism -- from the Rule of St. Benedict to the John Paul II's Ordinatio Sacerdotalis -- this statement would be simply laughable if it were not so sad.

Sadly, there is a huge gulf between Catholics -- as well as Christians in general -- today. On the one hand are those who follow periodicals like Crisis, First Things, and New Oxford Review. On the other hand are those whose flagship periodicals include Commonweal, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and the like. On the one hand are those who understand themselves to stand in the mainstream of the historic Christian Faith and Catholic Tradition and are dismissed by the other side as stuck-in-the mud reactionaries, throwbacks, medieval scholastics, etc. On the other hand are those, like Fr. O'Leary, 'Lovehandles' (another commentator on this blog) and their champions (Curran, Kung, Chittester, et al.), who understand themselves as standing at the forefront of a new, emergent consciousness and demystified revisioning of Christianity, and are dismissed by the other side as dissidents, liberals, and modernists.

As I have said before, the clearest litmus test to distinguish the two views is their attitudes toward the Bible. The Post-Mod Squad reduces it to a merely human book. It's low, all-too-human view of Scripture it naturally calls "higher criticism." They are the brave new world's "demythologizers." They are the bold and daring ones who, as Kreeft says, "dis-myth" the Bible as having no authority but that which resides in themselves and their eisegetical interpretive prowess. Like the "Buddy Christ" of Dogma, their Bible is whittled down to something on a manipulable human scale -- like a wax nose to be bent this way or that -- to suit their whim. They are the elite ones, the proud and few, who have reached sufficient maturity and erudition to realize that, just as they discovered as children that there was no Santa, they need to move on and grow up. And they're constantly reminding us that we, too, need to move beyond our infantile infatuation with small-minded, Santa-scale writers like G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and even Thomas Aquinas (all of whom lack the "credentials" to understand "higher criticism" of the Bible or to fathom its actual meaning) and learn to start taking in the "solid meat" of Charlie Curran, Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Joseph O'Leary, so that we can grow up, move beyond the scholastic constipation of our spiritual emotions, and chill out with Matthew Fox, Starhawk, and Sr. Chittester over our copies of Commonweal as we plot how to bring the Catholic Church out of the dark ages and into the 21st century. Above all, they realize the importance of outgrowing the "anxiety" of clinging to no-longer-tenable traditional religious convictions. But if we're sufficiently mature and erudite like them, they suggest, we will all eventually recognize that, after all, it's not so very traumatic to learn that there really weren't three Wise Men from the East, or a Star, or a miracle of turning water into wine at Cana, or the multiplication of loaves and fishes, or angelic visitations, or a parting of the Red Sea, or the Ten Plagues of Egypt, or the assumption into heaven of Elijah, or an axe head floating on water, or Balam's talking ass, or, for that matter, an historical resurrection of the historical Jesus that you could have actually seen if you were there (although they'll admit that, if ever, only in a whisper, because it so blatantly contradicts the CREEDS)! And they're REALLY EAGER about sharing this as though it some sort of great discovery!

The point is they've bought into a new paradigm, a new outlook, a new worldview, which, after all, is really quite old -- as old as secular humanism itself. But what they have probably never paused to consider is that it's not half as old or half as great and noble an outlook as Ancient Paganism was.

As G.K. Chesterton (whom Fr. O'Leary reminds us he has "outgrown") has said: "Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small." Well, Fr. O'Leary won't like this, but I can't help thinking that this Brave New Consciousness of his -- this new erudite outlook shared by he and his liberal friends -- is, after all, really quite small. Don't take that as a mere ad hominem. Consider: there were three things to be found in Ancient Paganism that made it great -- much greater than this secular New Consciousness.

First, it had a sense of piety, the natural religious instinct to respect and properly fear something greater than oneself, the humility that recognizes man's place in the order of things. The New Consciousness divinizes Fr. O'Leary's own consciousness -- at least for Fr. O'Leary. There is no magisterium to which he is subject but his own consciousness, his own conscience, his own instantiation of Hegelian "Absolute Spirit," or what have you. The Vatican has no REAL authority, except that which someone like Fr. O'Leary confers upon it by his altogether accidental and sporadic agreement. That, of course, is what nonrevisionist Catholics call "cafeteria Catholicism."

Second, Ancient Paganism had a clear perception of an objective moral order, an understanding that moral laws were absolute, discovered rather than subjectively "created," or socially or eidetically "constituted." The New Consciousness is relativistic, subjectivistic, pragmatic. It places human beings above the law. The ultimate law-giver is the human subject, either individually or writ large in the "collective unconscious." The only thing to ever feel guilty about is feeling guilty, since it collapses objective guilt (since there is no such thing, in its view) into subjective guilt feelings.

Third, Ancient Paganism retained a clear sense of the supernatural otherness of its object of worship. The New Consciousness has essentially lost all sense of the actual supernatural and, with it, a transcendent object of worship. Religion is demythologized, desacralized, demystified, demiraclized, and dedivinized. Consequently it verges in the New Consciousness towards variant forms of Pantheism, in which a "sacralization of psychology" enables people to talk about God while really meaning their own (collective) psyche, and vice versa. On this view we ourselves are seen as objects of worship, thus eviscerating the very concept of worship in the collective self-apotheosis of ourselves. God never makes any demands on us that we do not make of ourselves in this New Religion. By definition He cannot, because He is us.

Give me Ancient Paganism any day before this etiolated cancer ward apparition of revisionist Catholicism fed on a thin soup of demythologized Christianity and water. And give me the solid meat and wine of Catholic Tradition any day before Ancient Paganism. Fr. O'Leary, I'm afraid it will be a cold day in hell before you get around to persuading any of us to buy what you're selling. Write us off as reactionary fundamentalists, if that helps you cope with the rejection. Your comments are most welcome, and we will try to reply to them when we can find the time -- though I'm sincerely afraid that scarcely any of us can manage the kind of time that you seem to have on your hands. Please don't be too disappointed at our intransigence, if we don't respond with delight to your ideas. We're quite "ossified," you see. And we've heard most of these ideas before. They're variations on a very old theme, after all -- one that many of us have tired of some time ago. In the meantime, perhaps you will forgive us if we offer our prayers for you.