By GEORGE A. KENDALL
I wrote this in the last days (Thank God) of what some might call the Satanic Synod, known to others as the Amazonian Synod. As the dust settles, I would like to offer one thought in particular on the subject of the synod’s obsession with inculturation, and with it the notion that we need to help the “indigenous peoples” to keep their traditional “spiritualities” (a word that I am coming to have an allergic reaction to).
This is one of those partial truths that cry out for qualification and clarification, not the confusion the synod perpetrators seemed so bent on. Yes, there are many truths in the pagan religions, among them the sense of cosmic order and the reverence for the fertility of the Earth. This is something the Church recognized when she preserved the writings of pagan authors, knowing that we could benefit from the truths in these writings while rejecting the errors. St. Thomas, for instance, was heavily influenced by Aristotle and managed to find much that was compatible with Christianity in his writings, while rejecting what was erroneous.
So what we need to do in evangelizing pagans is to find what is true, even if distorted, in their religions, and to show that it can be found in Christianity, purified and complete, not partial and distorted.
Let us take the cult of fertility, for example. The awe at fertility is certainly grounded in truth. But then come the distortions, in the form of cultic practices like human sacrifice to fertility goddesses, orgies, temple prostitution, and so on. All these practices are abominations, deeply destructive to humanity. But for Christians, the holiness of fertility is embodied in Mary, the Holy Mother of God, the Theotokos or God-bearer. The truth found in the cult of Mother Earth is purified and brought to completion in her. The fertility of the creation, constantly bringing forth new life, is fully revealed in her alone, whose fertility made it possible for her to give birth to her Creator.
Again and again, “indigenous peoples, in becoming Christian, have found their humanity fully affirmed in the love of the Blessed Mother and her Son. What can they find in a fertility goddess, a Pachamama, who demands human sacrifice and many other abominations, that can possibly compare to the Mother of God, who asks for none of these things, but only for our love, in whom virginity and motherhood are united. A lovely Byzantine hymn says: “You are a mystical paradise, O Theotokos. Without seed you blossomed Christ, by whom the life-giving tree of the Cross was planted on the earth.”
This is what the “indigenous peoples” need, not their inhuman, destructive “spiritualities.
To those who threw the carvings of the Pachamama into the Tiber, I just want to say: Thank you! Praise be to Jesus Christ!
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Regarding the “refounding” of the John Paul II Institute in Rome: The defenders of this action seem anxious to give the impression that it is no big deal, that it only involves some nonessential modifications of an institution which will retain its continuity with the one founded by Pope St. John Paul II, that it is merely an “updating” (to paraphrase Thoreau, when you hear this word, run for your life). In other words, the change being made is accidental, not substantial.
This is an out and out lie, in a Vatican where truth is more and more being driven out. An accidental change is one in which the thing changed is fundamentally the same entity after the change as before — for instance, you have a red car and paint it blue. A substantial change is one where the end product of the process of change is a different kind of entity from what went before. Death is an obvious example. Before death, a man is a living entity, made up of body and soul, with intellect and will, with a body that breathes and circulates blood, and so on. After death, it is none of these things, only a corpse, a dead piece of matter.
Now, consider the John Paul II Institute. It was founded by Pope John Paul as a community of scholars whose mission is the study of marriage and the family, as understood in the light of reason and divine Revelation. Catholic truth is the form of this institution, its soul. No discipline could be more relevant to marriage and the family than moral theology. Yet the new, “updated” institute will eliminate moral theology from the curriculum. At least one of the new faculty members is pro-contraception.
The two professors who were most involved in the founding, teachers of moral theology, have both been fired. What will remain when the process is over will be not a living community of Christian scholars, but a soulless bureaucracy — a corpse, which will rapidly decay and disappear within a few years (but, sadly, only after stinking things up considerably). That’s what happens when you have no life.
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Every now and then the speculation surfaces in the Church that perhaps the souls of those who die in mortal sin are not condemned to eternal punishment in Hell but are merely annihilated. That idea has even been attributed to Pope Francis.
Well, why not? On the face of it, it would seem the merciful thing for God to do — sort of like taking a dog or a cat that turns out to be vicious and having it put down.
Here is the difficulty. Being, the reality of existing, of being something or someone and not nothing, is the greatest good any creature could have, since God is Being itself, and thus to have being is to share in the life of God Himself. So, in the ordering of goods which reflects reality itself rather than subjectivity or sentimentality, being deprived of being for eternity, is a far greater evil than eternal suffering, so not annihilating damned souls is an act of divine mercy.
This can be expressed even more clearly: Every human being ever created is made in the image of God. That image is the very essence of what a human being is, and that image, even horribly soiled and disfigured by sin, remains with its created goodness, and if it were to be annihilated, the human person made in that image would be annihilated. There is just no way to separate our humanity from the image of God, and God does not choose to annihilate His own image.
Some years ago I came in for some harsh criticism when, in a letter to a traditional Catholic magazine, I remarked that God loves the souls in Hell. The editor thought this a completely ridiculous idea, and, if I remember correctly, hinted that it might be heretical.
But I did not get this ridiculous idea from reading Hans Kung or some other far-out modernist. I got it from the Sisters of Mercy who were my teachers in Catholic school during the 1950s, none of whom could, in those far-off days, have been considered modernists by any stretch of the imagination. The image of God is forever, and He will not withdraw His love from any creature bearing that image. And it is because of the image of God in them that He continues to love them even in Hell.
(© 2019 George A. Kendall)
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