Today, August 21, is the feast-day of St. Pius X who was Pope from 1903-1914. A saintly man for sure, he was born into poverty and lived an ascetic and morally disciplined life, being greatly concerned about pastoral issues. He was greatly concerned with the needs of ordinary Catholics and also the needs of the poor and the confused of all faiths.
As was true of most Catholic leaders and Catholic thinkers over the previous four centuries, and remains true of most today, Pius X failed to respond in a positive, open-minded, and open-hearted way to modern knowledge even when it was straightforward knowledge about the physical things of God’s world. He attacked errors and did it in such a way that outsiders couldn’t see the positive content of traditional Catholic thought. Then again, part of the problem was the inability to speak in such a way that those outside the Catholic ghetto could understand what he was saying.
There were various reasons for the estrangement of Catholic thought from the mainstream of human thought since at least the 1600s and it wasn’t just the true or falsely perceived errors in that mainstream. Catholic thinkers failed to notice a truth discussed by John Henry Newman, an older contemporary of Pius X: even the most absolute of truths must be restated in each age of man as human language inevitably changes. Truths stated in the words and concepts of an earlier age can become errors. Sometimes, Catholics have participated in those language changes unconscious of the effects upon statements of Christian belief. For example, Catholic pro-lifers join other pro-lifers in claiming that we’re human persons at conception, confusing the traditional distinction between ‘person’ and ‘nature’. Was Jesus Christ a human person at conception? If not, He was different from us, not a true man. If He was a human person at birth, then He couldn’t have been a divine Person, the Son of God, unless we use a confused understanding of ‘person’. In fact, we’re particular manifestations of human nature at birth and become human persons to the extent we become Christ-like and take on attributes analogous to those of the only three true Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this points to a major problem: it isn’t those outside Christianity who are distorting the meaning of a word, ‘person’, necessary to express Christian beliefs. It’s mostly Christians who try to achieve one good, helping to protect the defenseless, at the cost of destroying their own ability to clearly express their beliefs or teach those beliefs to others.
The bigger problems have to do with empirical knowledge, knowledge of this phase of God’s Creation — our universe. Knowledge which I claim to have expanded to include increasingly plausible speculations about other phases of Creation, even plausible speculations about some very fundamental aspects of Creation. We have huge piles of empirical knowledge, much of which has not been properly organized from any perspective and very little has been organized from any Christian perspective, a strange situation since St. Thomas Aquinas seems to be exactly the hardheaded empirical thinker who can give us ways of dealing with modern knowledge of history and biology and physical matter at a fundamental level, even our sometimes disquieting knowledge of the history of Christianity and Judaism, including the sometimes strange history of the Bible. To his credit, St. Pius X had an instinct that Aquinas is that sort of important thinker but seemed to have a poor understanding of the Thomistic method which would lead a modern follower of Thomas to a respectful encounter with modern empirical knowledge as one way of enriching our understanding of Christian beliefs.
As one example of the refusal of Catholic thinkers to deal with modern empirical knowledge: they’ll claim to accept some version of evolutionary biology and then speak to their children and others as if there were a special creation of Adam and Eve. Many of the individuals who do that may not believe in that special creation and some may even realize there is a contradiction that makes their teachings sound like gibberish to children and adults who live in a world where television regularly broadcasts specials about all those bones dug out of the sands in Africa. There are still deeper problems in understanding the nature of being in Creation but those are more complex and require more explanation. The interested reader can explore this blog, starting with the category Christian in the Universe of Einstein.
Pius X was aware that something was seriously wrong, aware that the world was not truly hearing what the Catholic Church had to say — not that I’m claiming that a fair hearing would necessarily lead to mass conversions. For now, I claim only that Catholics and non-Catholics have much to teach each other. In any case, while Pius X was still a young man, John Henry Cardinal Newman was finishing up a productive life in which he’d helped to make possible a respectful self-critique of Catholic teachings and Catholic ways of speaking.
We’re in far better shape now. Pope John Paul II was open to modern empirical knowledge though I really don’t know if he had any serious knowledge of the specialized fields. Pope Benedict XVI is also open to modern empirical knowledge and has serious knowledge of at least medical biology. He’s also aware of the problems in a Catholic understanding of being that is not ‘broad’ enough given what we now know of the observable aspects of being in this universe — see Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Scope of Human Reason. I’ve also made a respectful criticism of his speech at Regensburg — see Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small. In retrospect, I may have been a little unfair because he might have been simply noting the truth of Hellenistic metaphysics and not claiming that truth to be nearly rich enough to describe being as implied by modern empirical knowledge, gravitational theory and particle physics and quantum mechanics and transfinite set theory and random number theory and so forth.
Pius X saw some of the errors which had taken root outside of the Catholic ghetto, errors which were naturally enough seeding themselves inside the ghetto as well. The Fathers of Vatican II threw open many of the gates and doors of the ghetto, knowing that God doesn’t want us to protect our faith by isolating ourselves from the greater part of the human world. Catholics responded with the joy of children being released from a dreary school but remained inside, taking advantage of their freedom more often than not by developing unattractive forms of worship and by destroying many of their valuable institutions. Others left the ghettos as a first step in leaving the Catholic Church or even Christianity of any sort. Pope John Paul II reminded Catholics, and others who listened, that Jesus Christ had told us: “Do not be afraid.” Engage the world with open hearts and open minds. Pope Benedict XVI has developed a reputation as a reactionary in some circles, partly because he wants to stop some of the silly celebrations of those who’ve not yet found the faith or courage to leave the ghetto, but he’s also trying to nurture that faith and courage in at least Catholic intellectuals that they might leave the ghetto to engage the outside world in a respectful give-and-take.
Better times are on the way for Catholic thinkers but I don’t expect to see them arrive during my mortal years.