You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 24th, 2008.
It’s true, Lord; my heart is restless unless it rests in you.
SoCon or Bust has an interesting little piece on Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Relevant quote:
With few exceptions, the wider Church has not accepted Humanae Vitae.
Could this be because so many of us are not converted? Or aren’t even trying to be converted? I’m not saying that all the people rejecting the contraception teaching are unrepentant bastards, as I’m sure quite a few have really given it some thought beforehand, but I have known so many lazy, lukewarm Catholics who barely even try to give the bare minimum and consider their faith more a burden than anything else. I’m sure I’ve been that way sometimes, too, but I do make an effort not to be.
I suppose the Church has always been mostly so. It’s the condition of man to turn away from God even as we want him desperately.
I have long held a fascination with maps, particularly historical maps. My sophomore and junior years of high school saw my bedroom’s little hangout nook covered in maps I swiped from my grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. There were maps of China and Mars, a sweeping map of Genghis Khan’s conquest of Asia, an immediate post-Soviet collapse map of Russia covered with these key questions wondering how Russia will get by. Over my bed was a map of the United States, which I had drawn over to accomodate an alternate-history world I was devising, and over my dresser one of Italy, covering the evolution of its borders from the Roman Empire to Unification. There was a large map of Australia toward the ceiling, which I’m sure must have been intentionally ironic on my part, and a diagram of the solar system immediately opposite.
What amazes me about maps is how they color our perception of the world, even in things as basic as “north” being “up,” which is itself a fairly recent convention. In China and much of the Pacific world, they use maps centered on the Pacific ocean, meaning we’re in the Far East, while American maps take the perspective that Western Europe is more or less the center of the world, and everything orients itself from there.
Maps have even colored our understanding of history.
Most maps in history books of the Western World are, more or less, centered on Germany, with Russia bleeding off the edge and Turkey off on the periphery if it shows up at all. At most, we see the tip of Morocco, and that’s it for North Africa. Europe seems mightily unconcerned with the Muslim world, and we’re mightily surprised to learn that North Africa spent seven-hundred years in the Christian column, and Turkey at least twelve-hundred. To our eyes, the conquest of the southern portion of the Mediterranean basin seems sensible; it’s clearly outside of Europe’s sphere. It’s unimportant. And of course we lost the Crusades — they were aaaaalllll the way over there, on the edge of the map. Holding it wouldn’t have made any sense.
But look at maps from the time, and see how they saw the world.
Asia on top. Europe and Africa on either side of the bottom, and Jerusalem square in the middle, the axis of the whole world, its very center and pivot. Europe didn’t see itself as the center of anything, but as one edge of a Christian world that rapidly began to collapse when Islam blasted its way out of Mecca. The drive to take Jerusalem and the Holy Land was an attempt to recapture, not some colonial periphery, but the key of the world.
Am I the only one who watches Groundhog Day and wonders about where God fits in to all of that?
Mark Shea continues the debate I inadvertantly started, and is kind enough to post it. Particularly interesting to me, being one of the driving questions in my own confusing mess with Judaism, is the question of what it means for the Church to be the “New Israel.”
For what it’s worth, you have bumped into a question on which the Church has basically never come to any clear conclusion, so far as I know. There are a range of opinions in Catholic teaching on just what the status of the people of Israel is in relation to the “New Israel”, with a few tips from the Magisterium on “how far is too far” in making any assessments. So, for instance, the Church insists (following the apostles) that there is salvation in no other Name than Jesus. That means that the Church is bound to hold that all who are saved (including Jews) will be saved through Christ. But this does *not* mean that only those who know who Jesus is and profess him as savior can be saved. So on the one hand, it goes too far for a Catholic to presume to know the fate of Jews, but it also goes too far to say that Jews can be saved apart from Jesus.
It’s a pretty pressing question, at least to me. The identity of the Church as the Body of Christ poses interesting challenges. At the onset of his ministry, he does not usually preach to the goyim, and even instructs his disciples to avoid their towns, and go first to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” There is a sense of secondariness, an after-the-fact element to the mission to the Gentiles that has always troubled me, and has also perhaps fueled my attraction to Judaism. The question isn’t “To what extent am I saved?” The question is “Where do I as a gentile fit, exactly, in the people of God if the Jews are the Chosen Race and the original and primary target of the ministry of Christ?”
An answer occurs to me: Christ wanted to bring the Gospel to Israel so that Israel would being it to the world, and be, as it was always intended, a light to the nations. That’s always been one of the primary functions of the Hebrew people as the Chosen — they are charged with the mission of serving God in the world and introducing the world to the Most High, a God who will accept worship and love from anyone but who has specificially asked the Jews to be his signpost.
In a sense, they are a sacrament, a symbol that makes present what it signifies, and Christ’s mission was originally directed at them with that in mind. Instead, though, of the wholesale conversion of Israel, he erected the Church; was this a stopgap measure, a plan b? Or was it always the plan to establish a multinational Church from the onset?
