“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.  And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”  --  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

So far I’ve agreed with Bishop McElroy that the distinction between principles and prudential judgments should be consistently applied to both social evils and intrinsically evil acts, but I’ve suggested that he is not consistently following his own advice.

As we saw yesterday, Bishop McElroy doesn’t argue that we shouldn’t distinguish between basic principles and prudential judgments, but that that we ought to apply this distinction consistently -- not only when we are considering social evils such as poverty, but also when we are considering intrinsically evil acts such as abortion.  I closed by saying that this is an excellent point, but the devil is in the details.  Why?

A long-running battle between the so-called Catholic left and the so-called Catholic right concerns which political issues the Church should speak about and which ones she shouldn’t. One crucial distinction is that teaching the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine go to the heart of her charism, but she has no special expertise in prudential judgments about how to apply them.

Query:

Query:

Query

After reading the Bible, it seems that God has “receded” from us -- Martin Buber’s term -- relative to his level of interaction with people in the Old Testament.  There must be a reason why He doesn’t just “come out of the closet,” appear to us in a cloud of light, speak to us, etc.  But why?

Reply:

“There is no humility in refraining from asking the questions; the humility consists in believing that there may be an answer.”  --  Charles Williams, "John Milton"

On Monday we considered the strange fact that the people in the pews need to be evangelized even before other people do.  On Tuesday and Wednesday we considered two kinds of obstacle:  Those which lie in the listeners, and those which lie in the proclaimers.

But the final obstacle to evangelizing Christians lies in the condition of Christendom itself.  We are divided.  Christ’s Body is torn.

Yesterday we considered the obstacles to the evangelization of Christians which lie in the listeners.  The next variety of obstacle lies in the proclaimers.