(Before I clicked on that link, I was afraid it would be about Catholic
apologetics.
In other words, I was afraid you were putting me on, Joe! :)
No, I hadn't seen a list like that before. But I was aware of most of those
apologies when they occurred and were reported in the regular news.
The list mentions the apology for the condemnation of Galileo.
But Galileo recanted, and wasn't executed.
(The most interesting thing about the Copernican controversy was that
the Church was at first glad for the heliocentric point of view,
since it simplified their calculations of important dates such as Easter.
Just as long as it was thought of as a pure mathematical fiction,
(which is what it is,) then they had no problem with it. Only when
someone claimed it to be reality did they get upset about it.
In fact, of course, it isn't reality. There is no fixed point or preferred
frame of reference in the universe at all. Moreover Ptolemy's
old way of calculating things with epicycles wasn't in the least bit
absurd. Nor is it out of date. It is essentially just a Fourier analysis,
and it lives on, more or less, in calculations of perturbations.)
So the Galileo apology wasn't any big deal.
Much more important to many people was another one of Pope JP II's
apologies (which isn't listed there): ---the
"official Catholic expression of 'profound sorrow'
and acknowledgement of error at Bruno's condemnation to death. "
Giordano Bruno had been imprisoned six years before he was even tried.
And yet, unlike Galileo, he never recanted.
At his trial he said:
"
Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me
with greater fear than I receive it."
Which, I think, is what's made Giordano Bruno the greatest of heroes to humanists.
Then of course he was gagged and "hung upside-down naked and burned at the stake"
for speaking his thoughts.
(snipped quotes from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno )
~~~~~~~~~~
Joe wrote: I enjoyed your defense of the Pope!
I wasn't defending the Pope.
I was merely attacking one of a great many idiotic lies
that are in current circulation.
And later on I will have reason to do something like 'apologetics'
for a couple of things that Pope JP II never did apologize for -- namely
his attitude about birth control and abortion. Because this subject has
come up again, in this very thread, just as I feared and knew it would.
So I'll have to clarify PJPII's actual point of view about it, or else
burn in my own private hell for my laziness and cowardice.
(the Pope is
NOT responsible for AIDS or over-population.)
But I won't defend the Pope per-se. With me it's all about the love of
pure unadulterated blind equity.
And to be truly fair, I know that when I am tired, and force
into the kinds of moods that I have been forced into lately,
then I probably will wind up just like everyone else, attacking
and defending things from my gut of childish loyalties.
~~~~~
Joe, I wonder if you remember
when Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli became Pope John XXIII?
I was 10, but I remember it very well. The colors of the smoke.
The conspiracy theories. I didn't understand what was going on.
But nobody else did either. To this day nobody knows what happened.
But Mel Gibson's father has ideas about it.
Then, a couple of years later, due to my father's Fulbright grant,
we were living in Rome, about 2 blocks from the Vatican,
when the second Vatican council was going on.
I think you have to admit that what happened at that council
was more important than Pope JP II's obviously sincere, but tepid apologies.
I subscribe to the American philosophy of 'pragmatism'.
The dictionary definition of it will do fine here:
Pragmatism: a philosophical movement or system having various forms,
but generally stressing practical consequences as constituting the essential
criterion in determining meaning, truth, or value.
Thus for example, to my way of thinking:
has no meaning, truth, or value,
since nothing changed in that department.
And now I am going to break off for awhile
while I try to figure out how best to get back on track.
~~~
Meanwhile, here are a couple of pages from
Bamber Gascoigne's "Christianity, A History".
It's just a quick survey of recent Catholic history for anyone who's
interested enough to read a few paragraphs about it, but not enough
to read a book about it.
But it is well written, and it isn't pro or anti anything,
and the part I quote at least shows that some things that some people
have undoubtedly been thinking of as eternal immoveable Catholic dogma
aren't that at all. They are really more like fads. (And anyone who's studied
the history of the Catholic Church knows of very many others of the kind.)
My point is that the Catholic Church can and does change over time.
(Which is what makes reading ex cathedra statements so fascinating.
Because no matter how radical a change any one of them really is,
it is always worded so as to sound as if it doesn't represent
any change at all. Things were always its way, from the beginning of time.
And all it is supposed to do is make that clear.)
And it should change. And it will change.
from Christianity, A History, by Bamber Gascoigne,
Garroll & Graf Publishers, N.Y., 2003,
pgs 207-209
The Christian churches have suffered the same pressures and challenges
as their individual members, and nothing shows the result more clearly than
the change in the Roman Catholic church over the past hundred years
- or, more precisely, between the first and second Vatican Councils.
A single pope, Pius IX, ruled for thirty-two years in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the longest pontificate in history.
When he mounted the papal throne in 1846 he was the type of pope
familiar for a thousand years - spiritual head of all Roman Catholics,
but also absolute sovereign of a large slice of central Italy,
the papal states.
At this time he had decidedly liberal views,
but they perished in the year 1848, when a revolution made him flee
for his own safety from Rome. By the time Pius died, the papal states
were part of the new nation of Italy, Rome was her capital city,
and Pius himself was the type of pope with whom we are familiar today
- still the spiritual head of the entire Roman Catholic world, but sovereign
now only over one-sixth of a square mile, the Vatican City.
As his temporal power had declined,
so his claims to spiritual authority had increased.
And the nature of that authority was increasingly reactionary.
At precisely the time when liberal theologians were beginning to classify
the Virgin Birth as a myth, Pius elevated to the status of a dogma
the equally magical concept of the Immaculate Conception.
This idea (that Mary, alone of all human beings since Adam and Eve,
had been born free from original sin) had long been part of the popular
and specifically Roman Catholic cult of Mary: by giving it at this late stage
the authority of dogma, the pope was making a deliberate gesture
both against Protestantism and against scientific rationalism.
He followed this up with a more precise broadside, his famous Syllabus
of eighty modern errors. these included such things as socialism, civil marriage
and secular education; the final error on the list was the view that
'the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress,
liberalism, and modern civilization'.
Pius completed the high defenses round his diminished state
by presiding over a Vatican Council in 1869-70 (the first such council
for over 300 years) at which he made a dogma of another long-standing
but unspecified tradition - that the pope, when speaking ex cathedra
on a matter of faith or morals, is infallible.
The Roman Catholic church maintained this high authoritarian stance
for nearly a century.
As recently as 1950 Pius XII put out an encyclical, Humani Generis,
warning against false teaching in schools. No one was to maintain, for example,
that there had been any human beings on earth since the Garden of Eden
who was not directly descended from Adam and Eve. (Behind this insistence
lay the need to safeguard the doctrine of original sin:
'original sin is the result of a sin committed, in actual historical fact,
by an individual named Adam, and it is a quality native to all of us,
only because it has been handed down by descent from him'.)
But twenty years later there had been the most profound transformation.
It was as though a fairy wand had miraculously translated
the church of Rome from one side to the other in all the old arguments.
The man who had wielded the fairy wand was himself
a most improbable piece of casting. In the conclave
which followed the death of Pius XII there were twelve ballots
before a decision was reached.
Clearly the seventy-seven year old Cardinal Roncalli
was no more than a compromise candidate, mainly acceptable
because his reign was certain to be short:
and it was equally obvious from his very conventional past career
that he would do nothing unusual as pope.
Instead, in his brief five years, John XXIII changed the Roman Catholic church
almost out of recognition - and incidentally endeared himself to the entire world
in a way that no other religious leader has ever done in his own lifetime.
By preserving the simple virtues of warmth and openness among the baroque
trappings of high office, he gave even the non-religious a sense of what religion
should perhaps be about. There was a feeling that we were watching something
never before seen by so many, the living reality of a saint. And indeed in
September 2000 he was beatified ( the first step towards canonization).
The act of John's which brought about such changes within the church
was his entirely unexpected calling of a council. From the start
it was evident that this would be a different sort of council.
In Vatican One the papacy had dictated; in Vatican Two it would listen,
and there was a great deal to listen to. Pope John had evidently
kept liberal ideas to himself during a lifetime of obedience,
and so - it turned out - had many others.
The resulting upsurge of free debated had widespread repercussions.
The most startling result, to the ordinary Catholic, was the changes in the form
of worship. Services are now in the vernacular. Lay people play a large part in them
and on occasion receive the wine as well as the bread. The Reformation
has finally reached Rome.
But the Protestant Reformation refused to stop where Luther intended:
the new sense of inquiry and of self-responsibility led inevitably to the hundreds
of Protestant sects with which we are familiar today. Change, once it is in the air,
will always be too fast for some, too slow for others.
And conservatism remains always a force to be reckoned with.
The reign of John Paul II, elected in 1978, almost rivals in length
that of Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century.
Like his predecessor, his natural tendency has been to resist change
- particularly on such contemporary issues as birth control and abortion.
