The Pope of the Gaps

We always have an implicit "outside interpreter" in so far as we interpret scripture against the background of our culture, our concerns, and often the historical tradition in which we grew up and which shapes our understanding of scripture.

It is interesting that in the discussions on the "New Perspective" on Paul, the implicit traditions of various strands of Protestantism have become more explicit, because they are taking their reading of justification primarily from Luther, and his reading of Galatians.

With regard to the primacy of Rome, there are certainly texts in the New Testament which can be cited in favour of the primacy of Peter (which have been mentioned in this discussion)

From a background of form criticism, this would suggest a community in which Petrine authority was important so that (for the moment bracketing out the historicity of these stories) these stories achieved a popular circulation in oral tradition and the gospels.

The hiatus in the tradition however comes when we move from this community to Rome. Irenaeus with his list of Bishops of Rome comes late in the 2nd century, and while his list must have come from somewhere, it is clear that the name Anacletus is doubtful.

Moreover, Irenaeus is making a polemic point, putting the succession of the bishops (and their authority) as a bulwark against heresy. So we have to ask: was this the case earlier, or did the situation change (and was reinterpreted) under pressure from, for example, Gnosticism.

The earliest possible source outside the NT is probably Clement, and this has nothing to say about Peter being in Rome, and little about the authority of the bishops of Rome. Clement notably does not use the same kind of argument as Irenaeus suggests was his to make.

So my problem is this: even given that there were New Testament communities which had a tradition of Petrine authority, there is a historical gap between that and both (a) the establishment of Peter as Bishop of Rome (b) the kind of authority that is claimed later by the Bishop of Rome, but which is not in evidence in the early historical record.

That is not to disallow developments in the primacy of the bishop of Rome as somehow illegitimate, for as Newman pointed out "all great ideas are found, as time goes on, to involve much which was not seen at first to belong to them, and have developments, that is enlargements, applications, uses and fortunes, very various". But I think it means the legitimacy of Papal authority should be established on other grounds.

Elizabethan Catholics

Brilliant summary (as part of his dialogue on the Gunpowder plot) by Ronald Hutton.
see the full stuff here:

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/e-h/hutton.html

Elizabethan Catholics

WW: What would it be like to live as a recusant in late Elizabethan England?

RH: The most common modern analogy for being an Elizabethan Catholic is being a Communist in 1950s America, but being a Communist in 1950s America was a holiday camp compared with being a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth.

Just like in the modern example, you couldn't actually get a job, you were cast out of society, you were suspected of being the local fifth column for a menacing foreign power that stood for everything that your country didn't.

But being an Elizabethan Catholic is actually much worse. You are in danger of having your property searched by armed men without warning at any hour of the day or night. You are fined regularly for the simple act of not turning up to your local parish church. So that's coshing your income at regular intervals.

And, above all, if you actually do what a Catholic is supposed to do, which is to hear the Word of God according to your Church, you need a priest. If you harbour a priest, you're in serious trouble, because this is technically treading on treason, and treason means going against the whole government of the land, to an extent that you risk your life.

WW: Why this fear of Catholicism?

RH: Protestants hated Catholics, because Catholics were the horrible, rotting skeleton in their family cupboard, where everybody had been about two generations before. That's when they were all being conned by the Devil who had perverted the Christian Church into Catholicism to remove everybody's chance of getting to Heaven and condemn everybody to Hell.

So having seen the light, having cottoned on to the real Word of God and got reformed, Protestants saw the Catholics as, collectively, the Devil's hit person – they were the storm troopers of Satan. They were the people who were left in the realm to ensure that the Devil had a real chance of winning back England to eternal fire.

Furthermore, in more straightforward terms, they were the agents of the pope and the pope was linked with the powers of France and Spain, particularly Spain, the strongest, most menacing power in western Europe. So what you're seeing is a Satanic superpower and an evil empire on your doorstep, and the Catholics lodging like a virus inside your body, waiting to kill you off.

Catholics are by definition the people who give loyalty to the pope. And the pope claims the power to depose kings and princes and queens who don't toe his line.

Now if you're an English Protestant around 1560, what you do is look in all directions. To your west is Ireland, stuffed with Catholics; to the north is Scotland, just ceasing to be Catholic, with the Highlands full of menacing Catholics armed to the teeth. Look across to the east and the south and you have the French and the Spanish, who are the super-Catholics, with all the power of a fully armed state system behind them.

So you are cornered, you're surrounded, and you have English Catholics still all among you, everywhere, just waiting for the button to be pushed, to implode your country from the inside, as their adherents crowd in from every point of the compass.

Confession

In the Tablet article, "Anyone for Confession" (2001), Annabel Miller comments:

To many Catholics today, the idea of entering a box with a man in black, running through a list of sins and emerging forgiven, can smack of a superstitious ritual rather than a process which actually changes anything.

She notes a Parish priest as saying:

Fr Nick Wilde, of Kirkby, Liverpool, reckons that in a single year only about 20 people will come to him for formal, individual confession. The practice has tailed off completely, almost finished, he told me. Fr Wilde is parish priest at St Laurence's church which has a congregation of 250. In his opinion, many practising Catholics have dropped individual confession because they have developed, with the Church's help, a greater sense of self-worth, and are no longer prepared to whisper guilty secrets to a mediating priest. He spoke of the popularity, by contrast, of communal reconciliation services where penitents either make an individual confession during the service or receive general absolution.

She highlights two things which have brought about this change. The first is what one might call the shift from looking at sins as a list to be ticked off, and looking it as a flawed response of the whole person, what one might call the existential perspective. From a personal point of view, there are some things I have done (or failed to do), which I certainly regret, but to see them as "detached" in that they can just be listed like a shopping list, as if they had nothing to do with the kind of person I am, is somehow just missing the point:

Sr Gemma Simmonds, chaplain at Heythrop College in London University, thinks the traditional form of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is being dropped by English Catholics because people do not look at their sins in isolation – three lies, four impure thoughts – but rather see them as part of a whole pattern of living as a necessarily flawed human being. The old way of going to confession made people feel guilty about trivial things without giving them a sense of responsibility for bigger things, she said. It was part of the minutiae of privatised religion.

The second factor she mentions is the "sin cycle", which, of course, I know from experience of non-Catholic polemic, was easily pilloried, with comments that Catholics go to confession, then having wiped the slate clean, are free to behave badly again. However, as with the shopping list approach, this has an element of truth in it, in that that kind of confession loses sight of the larger picture of the flawed nature of human beings in general. Equally, the idea of "mortal sin" as defined is a kind of category that can exist in a simplistic model of sin as act, but breaks down when pressed too strongly, both exegetically (as it depends on an older proof text approach to scripture, and philosophically, as human acts and choices are more complex and manysided than this kind of division suggests:

Another factor in the waning popularity of individual confession is that Catholics used to be taught to go regularly, in order to be eligible to receive Holy Communion in a state of grace. Each week, they engaged in a sin cycle – confession, communion, sin, confession, communion, and so on. The Church no longer insists on such regular confession – though it is forbidden for anyone to receive Holy Communion who has committed a mortal sin and not confessed it. Most ordinary Mass-goers would be hard-pressed to define a mortal sin, and I, for one, have never heard the definition explained from the pulpit.

As a post-Vatican II Catholic convert, I think the call to reiterate the importance of confession without rethinking it, and just trying to restore old forms, is doomed to failure. Miller quotes Dominian who is surely right in his argument:

The psychiatrist Jack Dominian argued that in its insistence on individual reconciliation, Rome is attempting to impose a spiritual form which no longer reflects the people's experience. As the people of God had matured, he wrote, the paternalistic stance of parent to child in the confessional has come to seem unacceptable.