Gabriel S. Sanchez - Opus Publicum

December 29, 2016 Wrestling

My Eighth Shameless Professional Wrestling Post in Years: Best Wrestlers of 2016

For the four of you who care, I have put together my list of the Top 5 professional wrestlers in 2016 from across the wrestling spectrum. I made my selections based on not only in-ring ability, but the impact they had on the sport in general. Obviously there are some factors which will always be out of a performer’s direct control, such as how well they are booked; the opponents they are given; and the overall health of the companies they work for. However, truly great wrestlers will find a way to transcend these limitations, sometimes in ways we’ve never seen before. Enjoy.

December 27, 2016 Year of 100 Books

Y100B: Kierkegaard

Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Zondervan 2016, 301pgs.)

As 2016 draws to a close, I found myself doing something I once thought impossible: reading a book published by Zondervan.

Backhouse’s biography of the great Dane purports to be “a fresh look” at the man and his times, but really it’s just Kierkegaard’s life and thought watered-down for generalists. Not that there is anything wrong with that. As Backhouse makes clear from the start, the extant Kierkegaard biographies available either amount to hagiography (e.g., Walter Lowrie’s classic treatment) or dense academic exercises. Backhouse delivers something slightly different, a treatment of Kierkegaard that is not entirely devoid of intellectual seriousness and yet gossipy enough for semi-popular consumption. In the end, however, the Kierkegaard of Backhouse’s biography is not all that different from the Kierkegaard of pious or academic study; he is still the tortured soul who broke a young girl’s heart on his way to attacking “Christendom,” that is, the official iteration of Lutheran Christianity that reigned supreme in 19th C. Denmark.

Mindful of his intended audience’s short attention span, Backhouse divorces his discussion of Kierkegaard’s life from his summary of the latter’s literary output, which constitutes a 50-page appendix to the book. That’s unfortunate since the summaries, rather than inspiring readers to explore Kierkegaard for themselves, are ripe for plagiarizing. Why spend a week with Either/Or or Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments when you can spend 5 minutes with Backhouse? By weaving his thoughts on Kierkegaard’s oeuvre into the text, Backhouse may have been able to entice his audience to explore Kierkegaard for themselves. An opportunity has been missed, methinks.

Overall, I can’t say too many bad words about Kierkegaard: A Single Life. Backhouse’s prose is fluid, his narrative well-paced, and his subject matter fascinating. Even so, Backhouse unintentionally stumbles into banality in a chapter assessing Kierkegaard’s legacy and influence. When he writes on Søren’s reception in European intellectual circles, I am intrigued; when he notes how pop bands and comedians reference Kierkegaard today, I am nauseated. But I suppose everyone has access to Wikipedia these days. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that the lowest elements of our disposable culture can so easily, and thoughtlessly, reference the most interesting man . . . in (1813-1855) Copenhagen.

December 26, 2016 Year of 100 Books

Y100B: Confessor Between East and West

Jaroslav Pelikan, Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj (Eeerdmans 1990, 249pgs.)

Maybe there isn’t much more for me to say about this book beyond what I noted earlier this year when I compared it to Cardinal Lubomyr Husar’s recollections. It is, however, a work I return to often, not because of its thoroughness (which is debatable) but because the sad reality is that so little exists in English on Patriarch Josyf and his writings. More than that, however, Peilkan’s portrait (and it is just that: a portrait, not an exhaustive treatment) is personally important to the extent that it helped turn my back to my Greek-Catholic childhood roots after spending more than a decade running away from them, first as an atheist; then as an Eastern Orthodox Christian; and finally as an Easterner in a decidedly Latin environment. Now is not the place to get into all of that; but I wanted to make mention of it if only to offer some explanation as to why I return regularly to a text that is sadly out of print and in some ways incomplete.

December 24, 2016 Liturgy

Hodie Christus Natus Est

When Augustus reigned alone upon earth, the many kingdoms of men came to end: and when Thou wast made man of the pure Virgin, the many gods of idolatry were destroyed. The cities of the world passed under one single rule; and the nations came to believe in one sovereign Godhead. The peoples were enrolled by the decree of Caesar; and we, the faithful, were enrolled in the Name of the Godhead, when Thou, our God, wast made man. Great is Thy mercy: glory to Thee.

– Doxasticon of St. Cassia for Nativity Vespers (Byzantine Rite)

December 23, 2016 Uncategorized

2016 – 10 Most Popular Posts

With 2016 drawing to a close, I thought I would put together a list of the 10 most popular posts on Opus Publicum this year based on WordPress’s accounting. Although Opus Publicum is far away from ever being a “major web-log,” several posts managed to caught far more eyes than I anticipated. Overall, however, 2016 was a “down” year with respect to traffic, likely due to the fact that other endeavors occupied a large chunk of the year. Befoe proceeding with the list, I should note that the most popular post was not an original piece by yours truly, but rather an unofficial translation of Patriarch Sviatoslav’s comments on the “Joint Declaration” signed by Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Havana, Cuba earlier this year.

Enjoy.

December 23, 2016 Church

Lightfoot

While thumbing through Lightfoot’s The Apostolic Fathers today, it occurred to me that these epistles and other documents from the second century of Christian history must still strike many today as strange, divorced as they are from our common experience of the Church. Indeed, many of the most treasured works from the centuries following the Ascension bear little resemblance to the theological manuals, spiritual scribbings, and unctuous religious prose that Christians of all confessional commitments consume on a regular basis. This isn’t a novel observation, mind you; it’s just an unsettling one. Could it really be that the Church of today—One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic—is not only far removed from the “church of yesterday,” but really amounts to little more than a hollowed-out relic that people cling to out of cultural habit more than sincere religious conviction?

As 2016 draws to a close, I would prefer to not slip into pessimism, but it is . . . difficult. Still, in these times, I try to remind myself that I have no right to despair. None of us do. The problem is that hope, sincere and realistic hope, is so alarmingly elusive. It’s not enough to just say, “I hope for the best” or “I hope things will improve.” That desire never leaves. What doesn’t wish to stay is the sense that this hope can lead anywhere except to crushing disappointment. And then I look back to the Apostolic age, the Arian crisis, Iconoclasm, the Great Schism, and the relatively more recent onslaught from atheistic communism and I start to see, albeit faintly, that what unites the Church of Christ through the ages is suffering for the truth. Granted, in this day and age of entertainment and ease, the meaning of suffering has been grossly distorted to the point where we might need a new word to describe experiences more agonizing than poor cell phone reception or slow download speeds for pornography. So it goes.

Confronted with these truths and listening to them with attention, ye shall know how much God bestoweth on those that love (Him) rightly, who become a Paradise of delight, a tree bearing all manner of fruits and flourishing, growing up in themselves and adorned with various fruits. For in this garden a tree of knowledge and a tree of life hath been planted; yet the tree of knowledge does not kill, but disobedience kills; for the scriptures state clearly how God from the beginning planted a tree [of knowledge and a tree] of life in the midst of Paradise, revealing life through knowledge; and because our first parents used it not genuinely they were made naked by the deceit of the serpent. For neither is there life without knowledge, nor sound knowledge without true life; therefore the one (tree) is planted near the other. Discerning the force of this and blaming the knowledge which is exercised apart from the truth of the injunction which leads to life, the apostle says, Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. For the man who supposes that he knows anything without the true knowledge which is testified by the life, is ignorant, he is deceived by the serpent, because he loved not life; whereas he who with fear recognises and desires life plants in hope expecting fruit. Let your heart be knowledge, and your life true reason, duly comprehended. Whereof if thou bear the tree and pluck the fruit, thou shalt ever gather the harvest which God looks for, which serpent toucheth not, nor deceit infecteth, neither is Eve corrupted, but is believed on as a virgin, and salvation is set forth, and the apostles are filled with understanding, and the passover of the Lord goes forward, and the congregations are gathered together, and [all things] are arranged in order, and as He teacheth the saints the Word is gladdened, through Whom the Father is glorified, to Whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

– Epistle to Diognetus

December 21, 2016 Law, Politics, World

Critical and Unclear

Critical theory is a fun little tool that will get you published, maybe even laid on a college campus, but not much else. Pick whatever you wish off the shelves of any Left-leaning library and run with it. If you should be endowed with better-than-average literary chops, you might even be able to secure tenure, or the next best thing: a well-trafficked web-log. Although it stands to reason that there have been critical theorists over the past century who genuinely believed that their largely masturbatory pet projects were actually in the service of “human liberation” (whatever that means), the harsh reality is that most of what emerged from, and following, the so-called “Frankfurt School” remains a niche academic interest for graduate students who don’t really understand life and undergraduates who understand neither life nor the theories that ostensibly elucidate it. Rather, under the critical gaze, all of life is reduced to a series of power struggles, deceptions, interpersonal conflicts, and epistemological anarchy and communication becomes little more than an empty exchange of jargon-filled platitudes parading as insights.

Had I, more than a decade ago upon leaving undergrad, thought that I would still be running across the critical-theory crowd, I might have been inclined to go live in a shack in Montana. It had been my assumption that children’s things would no longer be relevant once I entered the “real world,” and for a time my “real world” was legal academia as both a student and faculty fellow. Sure, legal studies, like most disciplines at one time or another, flirted with critical theory, but by the time I was hard at study that movement had been suffocated by the equally noxious “Law & Economics” movement (one, which I am sorry to say, I actually got behind). Penning law-review pieces that quoted Marx, Horkheimer, Barthes, Habermas, etc. stopped being “edgy” 25 years ago. Sure, for obvious reasons there was still room for some Foucault, but who today wants to admit they spend serious time with the likes of Catharine McKinnon, Duncan Kennedy, and Roberto Unger?

I write this despite the fact several acquaintances of mine believe that what we need now more than ever is a refresher on critical theory, specifically its roots and the social movements some believe it inspired. I imagine this sentiment has emerged out of a general frustration with the contemporary Left, specifically the contemporary young Left and its obsession with the pettiest form of identity politics and melodramatic declarations of oppression. Although less visible, and probably not front-and-center in the mind of any Leftist, is the small but apparently growing body of Christian Leftists who, in an often confused and contradictory manner, adopt what they think is a Leftist posture in order to make themselves appear relevant in a cultural milieu that really has no interest whatsoever in what “Jesus Kids” have to say about poverty, racism, war, and so forth. Might it not be possible, some hope, for the Left to be reinvigorated by a return to a more serious time, a period when critically engaging the world and its power structures meant more than sending out Tweets and discussing “polity” with your fellow white, Ivy League graduates?

Maybe, but it seems to me that a return to seriousness is a return to the days when men would kiss their wives, hug their children, and take to the streets, mountainsides, or forests with knives, guns, and Molotov cocktails to not simply “make a point” but literally take apart the machinery of their misery. Not that I endorse such a course of action, mind you, at least not for all of the purposes and interests that often motivated such otherwise well-meaning men, but there is a great deal to be said for having, as they say, “skin in the game.” For nearly a century, a good number of anarchists, communists, and socialists of all shapes and sizes had a great deal of “skin in the game”; if you don’t believe me, just spend a bit of time perusing the history of Western Europe and the United States from the 19th Century onward. Tales of government-backed manipulation, maiming, and murder—all in the name of upholding the fruits of liberalism—fill the history books or, rather, ought to. Actually, what fills the history books even to this day is one long lie about the “progress” of human history and our arrival at its “absolute moment,” an era of unfettered access to porn, booze, and reality television.

During long stretches of highway driving, or even in just a quiet moment of personal reflection taken while in line to buy cigarettes, I have found myself wondering that if/when the “revolution” comes, who will be lined up against a wall and shot first: Me or the coffee-shop commie kid? I jest. There is no revolution coming, at least not from the Left. The steady erosion of life—its meaning and transcendence—that is and has always been part of the liberal project will likely continue unabated during my sojourn on this earth. To hope for anything else seems unreasonable, and yet it is terrifically easy to imagine three or four moves on the global chessboard that could quickly turn the relative passivity of Western (post)modern existence into a bloodbath. Perhaps that’s already happening and for reasons which are still unclear to me, I don’t want to see it.

December 20, 2016 Uncategorized

Theologizing as an Eastern Catholic

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8zyW0gmY8]

My previous post, “Some Brief Words on the ‘Orthodox in Communion with Rome’ Phenomenon,” along with a recent unedifying discussion with certain extremists from that camp, prompted me to revisit Fr. Andriy Chirovsky’s provocative 2014 talk, “Theologizing as an Eastern Catholic After Orientalium Ecclesiarum,” which was delivered at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of that document.

I don’t want to attempt summarizing the talk; I doubt I would do it full justice. However, let me say that Chirovsky represents a balanced understanding of what it means to be an Orthodox in communion with Rome, even if he does not use that particular expression here. That is to say, he understands that it is both necessary and proper to be both fully Orthodox, and fully Catholic while recognizing the historic difficulty of this position from the time of the Union of Brest onward. Moreover, Fr. Andriy puts on the table the reality that unlike the Orthodox, Eastern Catholics cannot simply dismiss Roman doctrines (or the formulation of those doctrines) as wrongheaded but must instead endeavor to understand them in a complementary fashion that remains true to the Christian East’s theological patrimony.

Some will, of course, harbor reasonable disagreements with some of Chirovsky’s observations, though even he admits that the talk is an exploration rather than a final declaration. He embraces, without apology, the need for Eastern Catholics, specifically Ukrainian Greek Catholics, to confront Roman teachings with an authentically Byzantine understanding, even at the risk of conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fr. Andriy asserts this not in the interest of stirring up needless controversy or rejecting settled dogma, but as part of the Ukrainian Church’s larger witness to the importance of unity with Rome without falling prey to a subservient mentality.

December 20, 2016 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church

Some Brief Words on the “Orthodox in Communion with Rome” Phenomenon

It’s probably not worth dwelling too much on the phenomenon known as “Orthodox in Communion with Rome” (OICWR), an initially well-intentioned reorientation of how Greek Catholics understand their relationship with Rome which has—at least in certain online forums—degenerated into a cafeteria ecclesiology. Although there are several variants of OICWR, the most extreme (and seemingly most vocal) wing takes the position that the Greek Catholic churches need not treat as ecumenical or binding any “Roman council” held between the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II) and the Second Vatican Council. Not even Florence, which transpired with the participation of the Greek Church, is seen as binding due to its eventual repudiation by the Orthodox. By radical OICWR reckoning, Purgatory, the Immaculate Conception, and Papal Infallibility are not settled dogmas for the universal Church but rather Latin doctrines that amount to little more than theological opinions which can, and perhaps ought to be, critiqued in the light of the Byzantine theological tradition. Instead of seeking a shared understanding on the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith, the OICWR extremists revel in the apparent divisions that allegedly separate East from West. And, like all good ideologies, these individuals are quick to disparage their critics, including their Greek Catholic critics, as “Latinized” or “Uniates.”

Needless to say, the OICWR—moderate and extreme alike—claim to take their bearings from the Vatican II declaration Orientalium Ecclesiarum despite the fact that no less an authority on things Orthodox than Fr. Alexander Schmemann, an observer at the Council, found the document unsatisfactory in certain respects. The extremists also point to the “sister churches” ecclesiology promoted by Vatican II, albeit in splendid isolation of the 2000 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Note on the Expression Sister Churches.” Moreover, for reasons that remain vague and underdeveloped, the far reaches of the OICWR seem to believe that the perilous project of “reclaiming their tradition” (as if the historic Greek Church only had a single tradition) means imitating the theology, spirituality, and liturgy of the contemporary Orthodox Church, as if it that communion, both before and after the “Great Schism” of 1054 A.D., was monolithic and without change. The pursuit of a “magic moment” of “purity” in the fog of history often results in pick-and-choose “reconstruction” which, in the end, bears little resemblance to how things ever were.

None of this is to say that the Greek Catholic churches (Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Melkite, etc.) shouldn’t take proper and prudent steps to remove accretions from their liturgy that undermine its integrity nor ignore the rich Eastern theological patrimony in favor of Thomism. Greek Catholics have been rightly encouraged to maintain their identity in recent decades. However, there is a wide gulf between maintaining one’s identity and taking up positions that are openly hostile to the Catholic Faith. It seems that the fringes of the OICWR movement are more interested in appeasing the worst circles of Orthodoxy rather than standing firm for true catholicity, that is, particularity within universality. No one today should seriously buy into the shopworn prejudice that “to be Catholic” is “to be Latin.” Still, that is not a warrant for rank doctrinal dissent and schism mongering.

December 20, 2016 Year of 100 Books

Y100B: A Life of Blessed Gennaro Maria Sarnelli

Franceso Chiovara, C.SS.R., A Life of Blessed Gennaro Maria Sarnelli: Redemptorist (Liguori Publications 2003 (1996), 113pgs.)

It struck me as prudent to start my “Year of 100 Books” endeavor with a short work, and one that should spiritually edifying. Having had very little direct knowledge of Blessed Gennaro Sarnelli, I stumbled across this brief work quite by accident while perusing the shelves of a local Catholic bookstore some months ago. The book, which was written initially in 1996 for Sarnelli’s beatification by Pope John Paul II (Sarnelli had been declared venerable 90 years earlier by Pope Pius X), is not a classic work of hagiography, nor is it a detailed critical biography. Rather, it is a brief recounting of Sarnelli’s life, work, and writings filled with equal parts uplifting details and needless polemical potshots at Tridentine ecclesiastical life, traditional piety, and, somewhat ironically, classic Redemptorist spirituality. Such is the way of things in the era after the Second Vatican Council.

Sarnelli, for those unaware, came from a prestigious Neapolitan family, had a brief career as a successful lawyer, and then, like his friend St. Alphonsus Liguori, answered God’s call to the priesthood and eventually joined the nascent Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists). During his 41-year stay on earth, Sarnelli was perhaps best known for his work among the poor and sick, particularly his work with prostitutes and his desire to remove prostitution altogether from the city of Naples. As the author notes, Sarnelli (like Liguori) was out-of-step with his times for both refusing to see prostitution as a “necessary evil” to be tolerated and linking prostitution to poverty. Although Chiovara chides Sarnelli for not being a “social reformer” dedicated to some modern sense of “equality,” he does recognize that Sarnelli wanted to rid prostitution by finding other alternatives for the young women whose circumstances had forced them to sell their bodies.

Beyond his work with prostitutes, Sarnelli, like the other Redemptorists of his time, preached missions among the most poor and abandoned in society while also offering spiritual instruction to any who would listen. Sarnelli’s tireless work, coupled with long hours spent ministering to the sick and dying, took a terrible toll on his health, leading him to question God’s favor and making him fearful of death. By the close of his life, however, Sarnelli was given spiritual consolation and died a peaceful death on June 30, 1744. Although he was given only 12 years to serve as a priest of Jesus Christ, he made a lasting impact on Naples and the surrounding areas and the cause for his canonization was taken up a century later.

While I appreciate the knowledge gained of Blessed Genarro’s holy life, I find books like this to be distasteful to the extent that they seem intended to denigrate Catholic piety and holiness from Trent up to Vatican II. The author never misses a chance to remind readers about the “bad old days” and to make the Church appear to have been a harsh, thoughtless, and insensitive institution that “miraculously” produced a handful of “progressive” priests who placed the social above the spiritual. The end result is a rather uneven work which should be read with caution.