TO LIGHT A FIRE!
66-120920
Very
few will quite understand Joaquin G. Bernas SJ in his PDI Sounding Board column pieces
of 10 September and 17 September 2012
entitled “Conversing with a bishop” and “Dialogue with the bishops”
unless his previous ones on the Reproductive Health Bill are taken
in perspective together with prior MAJOR
developments in their “Society”.
For
a good number of years now JGB has been already showing his implacably contrary
position against the moral doctrine of the Catholic Church on the use of
contraceptives as an intrinsic evil. Thus he has been
constantly SNIPING in pejorative terms and tones against us who reject HB 4244, as ‘hardliners”, “loyal Catholic
catechists”, and who ought per JGB, to be reminded about religious freedom and pluralism, and the supposed moral supremacy of conscience. Accordingly he has repeatedly implied that
such principles have been erroneously explained in the old Baltimore Catechism. And yet the
late famous Jesuit priest theologian John Courtney Murray, the acknowledged prime
advocate for Religious Freedom during
Vatican II, had this to say about contraceptives, which he explained through
public MEDIA even during the days when the same Catechism was still being taught in most Jesuit schools.
“First, (in
accordance with religious freedom) a man may not be coercively
constrained (forced) to act against his conscience as a general principle according to
Vatican II in Dignitatis Humanae. Second, a man may not be coercively restrained (prevented) from acting
according to his conscience, unless the action involves a civil offence against the
civil rights of others.” Therefore I challenge JGB to prove that there is anything in the Baltimore
Catechism that is explicitly contrary to what Father Murray PUBLICLY declared
on the same issues of contraception, vis-à-vis
conscience.
“x x x Catholics themselves must be made
to understand that, although contraception is not an issue of public morality
to be dealt with by civil law, it remains for them a moral issue in their
families’ lives to be decided according
to the teaching of the Church. (Just) because
contraception is made legal, it is NOT (consequently)
made moral, anymore than it should be made illegal simply because it is
immoral.”
And
yet JGB and I were both instructed in the Catholic Faith at the Ateneo de Naga High
School in the late 40s and early 50s, when the Baltimore Catechism was the
standard textbook for Freshmen. Though he was two years ahead of me in school,
we had the same Jesuit teachers in our religion classes such as Rev. Fathers James
B. Reuter, Lorenzo Ma. Guerrero, Agustin Bello et cetera, who after their Final
Jesuit Vows made a public declaration of their Loyalty to The Pope at our school chapel by means of an equally
solemn and formal vow pledging their lifetime loyalty to the person and
teachings of the Pope. All senior Jesuits had been making this 4th
Vow from the time of its founder St. Ignatius de Loyola more than 400
years ago. That public 4th Vow has been practically
DISCARDED starting from the late 60s and completely so these days. Incidentally,
our constantly and publicly proclaimed school motto was then Primum
Regnum Dei. So now in contrast, JGB obviously supports a contrary
PRIORITY in academic objectives by his having directly quoted the former and
deposed Jesuit Superior General Peter
Hans Kolvenbach who had imposed the following exclusivistic policy for all
Jesuit schools and universities: “The University has its purposes which can
not be subordinated to other objectives” (vide, JGB-PDI column of 2
September 2012).
A
few years after Kolvenbach became Superior General, I was waiting for a top
corporate taipan for our conference
with him together with a prominent and widely revered (in the Philippines)
American Jesuit. While waiting, he recounted to me in a hushed voice right
there in the plush conference room of the honcho’s Makati, Ayala Avenue
corporate headquarters, that he and eleven other top ranking Jesuits in the
Philippines were convened many years before then, to decide whether or not to
express public support for Pope Paul VI and his encyclical (circa 1996) Humanae Vitae. Papa Bear, as the good Jesuit Father
usually called himself when confidentially writing to me, whispered: “the vote was 11 to 1 against poor Pope Paul VI!” Affiant
further sayeth naught, except to exhort all truly loyal Catholics to pray
for JGB and others like him. We should have done so since 1966…
In
further perspective, the highest Jesuit authority is its Legislative Congress
which convenes from time to time such as the 32nd General Congress of 1975. Article 66 under Decree No. 4 of that Congress reads as follows: (emphasis and
explanatory comments supplied)
66.
“Solidarity with the Society is primary.
It ought to take precedence over
loyalties to any other sort (sic!) of
institutions, Jesuit or non-Jesuit. It ought to stamp any other commitment
which is hereby transformed into “mission”.
The mission as such is bestowed by the Society and is subject to her
review. She (hence, as an autonomous Society free to do whatever its superiors think fit & proper!), can
conform or modify it as the greater service of God may require.” (Again, according ONLY to what and how this greater service is defined SOLELY by themselves!)
In
stark contrast the Apostolic Letters of Pope Paul III (circa 1540) and Pope Julius III (circa 1550) which canonically authorized the Society, officially declared that it was so authorized “chiefly for this purpose: to strive
especially for the defence and propagation of the faith, and for the progress
of souls in Christian life and doctrine….”
Thus
in the year 1553 St. Ignatius of Loyola their Founder and first life-time Superior
General, severely admonished and reminded the Jesuits of Portugal (who just
like those in the Philippines today were at public odds with their Bishops),
that Jesuits must be “second-to-none” in their obedience to
the local Church Magisterium and the
Pope! Significantly, when Jesuit Superior Generals were STILL of the same revered mold and mind as St. Ignatius up to the
late 1950s, the Society was at a peak
strength of more than 70,000 loyal and
cohesive all-male members. Since then they have dwindled to some 18,000 more or less, but mostly old or retireable
survivors known to and twitted by many, including JGB himself, as “Tre Jesuiti, quattro opinioni”. But according to my Jesuit Papa Bear, only around 30% of them are no longer avowed and
actual loyalists of the Catholic Church Magisterium and the
Pope.
And
so, contrary to JGB’s published opinions, here is what Pope John Paul II
AUTHORITATIVELY and succinctly had to say on conscience vis-à-vis religious freedom and pluralism
in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor Sections 29 to 34 thereof: (with emphasis
and notes added)
Nevertheless,
(the Church) has the duty to state that some
trends in theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations are incompatible
with revealed truth.
In contemporary moral thinking, all
discussions are closely related to one crucial issue: “human freedom”… but it
is expressed sometimes in ways that diverge from the truth about the human
person as a creature in the image of God, ways that need to be corrected
and purified in the light of faith.
Certain currents in modern thought (have) made of freedom something absolute, which then
becomes the source of values. In this way the sense of the transcendent is
lost, or one is explicitly atheistic. In this case it is (supposedly) the individual conscience that decides
categorically and infallibly what is good and what is evil. To the
affirmation that one has to follow one’s conscience is added the (FALSE) affirmation that a moral judgment is true (merely) because it has its origin in conscience. The inescapable claims of truth disappear,
yielding their place to a criterion of self-alleged sincerity,
authenticity, and of “being at peace with oneself.” Once the idea of a
universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, the notion
of conscience inevitably also changes. One’s conscience is then no longer an
act of a person’s intelligence applying the universal knowledge of good to a
particular situation in a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here
and now. Instead there is the tendency to grant to the conscience of the individual
the prerogative to determine on its own and independently, what is good and
evil and to act accordingly. In the latter way each individual is faced
with his or her own truth* different
from the truth of others*. In the
final instance it can lead to a denial of the very idea of human nature. (*NOTE: Hence typically resulting in “Tre
Jesuiti, Quattro opinioni”)
The questions about freedom and
morality cannot be separated. Though each individual has the right to be
respected in his or her own journey, there
remains a prior moral obligation to seek
the truth. As Cardinal J.H. Newman put it: “Conscience has rights because
it has duties.”
Yet no amount of human reasoning
will ever convince our rebellious modernist/Jesuits
such as JGB and his 192 or so Ateneo Catholic professors/disciples, HUMBLY to
re-embrace their previous loyalty to and total FAITH in the Catholic Church as
the Mystical Body of Christ Himself,
and the Pope as Christ’s Vicar on earth. Indeed FAITH is a gratuitous divine
gift whose sine qua non
pre-condition is HUMILITY, as taught to us and so expressed in the same Baltimore
Catechism. That doctrine on
faith has NOT been removed nor altered in the present official Catechism
of the Catholic Church as was prepared and approved by the Bishops of
the whole Church and Pope John Paul II in 1992, or some 30 years after Vatican
II.
And that is why our Bishops in the
Philippines most of whom are explicitly loyal to the Papacy, continue to oppose
HB 4244, precisely because of
those 192 Ateneo Catholic professors’ PUBLIC DISSENT, and regardless of
the constant criticism against particular bishops coming from JGB, a Jesuit
Catholic priest. Strange, but indeed as prophesied by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, it is now a pandemic reality during
these end times…..
Eduardo B. Olaguer
Catholic Xybrspace
Apostolate of the Philippines
< www.catholicxybr.org >
< cxaphil@yahoo.com >
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