Abdicating Apostolicity?

Despite having been published by the Pontifical Academy for Life, their recent document Humana communitas in the Age of Pandemic:  Untimely Meditations on Life's Rebirth bears little or no magisterial weight; it does not bear the signature of the dicasterial prefect, let alone of the Vicar of Christ.  More than that, the theologically problematic tone of the entire document, especially in light of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, likely disqualifies it of any possible 'note of certitude' it may carry.

It will not be my intention to critique the document; the fact that it does not even once mention God or Christ speaks for itself.  Professor Stefano Fontana, consultant for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and director of the Cardinal Van Thuân Observatory on the Social Doctrine of the Church, has written an introductory assessment of the document, and the interested reader is invited to review his comments.

Two things, in particular, stand out about this document:  First, the complete setting-aside of what Vatican II has described as "scrutinising the signs of the times":

To carry out such a task, the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.  Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other.  We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its explanations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics (Pastoral Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et spes, n. 4).

Second, and closely related to the above, is a dereliction of the Church's apostolic, evangelical mandate imposed upon us by none less than the Lord Jesus.

I will only be brief regarding the first point:  Clearly, nowhere does the document seek to explore the problem of Covid-19 and make an attempt at "interpreting them in the light of the Gospel."  Several months ago, Dr Mary Healy published an article with the provocative title, Is the Coronavirus Pandemic a Judgment from God?--exploring, in her competence as a Biblical theologian (S.T.D., Pontifical Gregorian Univeristy, 2000) and as professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, the question of God's permissive providence which sees fit to discipline and chastise his children.  If you haven't read it, do.

Of course, the idea of God medicinal chastising is passé--despite the fact that St Thomas Aquinas treats of it in his Super ad Hebraeos, C.12, L.2, 673-682 and elsewhere in his theological syntheses--yet I have not come across any articles or monographs that effectively refutes the idea of medicinal chastisement on the part of God; nor have I seen any studies trying to interpret the pandemic in the light of God's permissive providence (besides Dr Healy's).  While I have my own thoughts about whether our current situation is one of God administering loving discipline, the fact that there is little, if any, discussion of this in the document seems to me a direct sidestepping of the recent Council's reiteration of the Church's "duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times" and a pronounced lack of courage in even countenancing the question.  And for those who do not think it a question sufficient to trouble oneself with--such as the authors of Humana communitas--do not the lay faithful at least deserve to have their questions acknowledged?  This strikes me, therefore, as an especially callous display of clericalism, so rightly decried by Pope Francis.

The very subtitle--Untimely Meditations on Life's Rebirth--with the adjectival "Untimely"--calls into question the very existence of "Providence" in the minds of the authors.  A philosophy in which man devises his own meaning cannot, by any mental gymnastics, be Christian.

My second question, I think, is the more urgent one:  The aforementioned document strikes me as an especially egregious dereliction of the Church's missionary mandate; the following remark by the spokesman of the Academy for Life is particularly disingenuous:  "I do not know, at this point, whether philological ‘accounting’ work on how many times a few key words recur in a text is useful.”  The "philological" paucity of "Jesus" or "Gospel" completely misses the point if even the substance of it is missing.  What's more, it fails to see the problem of suffering as a summons to conversion, as the late Pope John Paul II's Salvifici doloris laboured to make clear:

This is an extremely important aspect of suffering. It is profoundly rooted in the entire Revelation of the Old and above all the New Covenant. Suffering must serve for conversion, that is, for the rebuilding of goodness in the subject, who can recognize the divine mercy in this call to repentance. The purpose of penance is to overcome evil, which under different forms lies dormant in man. Its purpose is also to strengthen goodness both in man himself and in his relationships with others and especially with God (n. 12).

Perhaps, more accessibly, are these words from the great Anglican layman, Prof C. S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain:

But pain insists upon being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world...No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.

The Academy's spokesperson indicated that the document was designed to "reach the widest possible audience."  That's splendid.  So why not use this "widest possible audience" to advance the cause of Christ?

Throughout the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is the principal animator of the Church's mission to evangelise; Acts 1:8 is paradigmatic of exactly this.  During His Farewell Discourse, the Lord made it clear that "the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (Jn 14:26).  One must ask whether the Holy Spirit was not invoked but resisted on account of the document's complete sidestepping of Jesus' teachings, to say nothing of Matthew 10:32.

 

Perhaps even more disingenuous is the invocation of St John XXIII's words, "it is not the Gospel that changes, it is we who understand it better and better," to justify exactly what's lacking in the document, because, again, not even the substance of the Gospel is discernible.  Indeed, the invitation to examine one's ethics which spurred the pandemic is laudatory, but it was left to Pelagian devices.  And, as St Thomas makes so clear in his treatise on "the New Law," the grace of the Holy Spirit is at the heart of the Gospel, we end up discovering something rather contrary to it in the document.

So I reiterate my question:  Why did not this document see the pandemic as an evangelical moment?  Has the Church's missionary mandate metamorphosed into one of social action only and of a merely this-worldly Kingdom of God?  Do we not have lives of supernatural virtue to live, and do we not have eternity to look towards?  In a world searching for answers, and in a world where--note well!--politics, not religion, obfuscates pharmaceutical research towards a medicinal resolution, and in a human community looking for transcendent answers, the Pontifical Academy for Life saw fit to abdicate the Church's apostolic duty to "...preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching" (2 Tim 4:2).

Only now can I really appreciate His Holiness' project of Curial reform.  More than that, given the dicastery's choice to ignore the founder's pastoral programme at the start of his pontificate, Redemptor hominis--and the current Pontiff's Evangelii gaudium--strongly indicates that Humana communitas in the Age of Pandemic can be set aside as a case study in how not to 'do' and 'be' missionary disciples.

In conclusion, I submit that the tired and overused words of Chesterton has now taken on a new meaning:

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult; and left untried.