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Gulf Pine Catholic
•
February 27, 2015
The bilateral diplomacy of the Holy See is unique in
world affairs, in that it has little or nothing to do with
the things with which diplomats typically occupy their
time: trade issues, security matters, visas. Rather, the
reason why the Vatican engages in bilateral diplomacy
is to secure the freedom of the Catholic Church to be
itself in the countries with which the Holy See has, or
wishes to have, diplomatic relations. To be sure, in
crisis situations, the Holy See’s representative in a
crumbling or violence-ridden state can also serve as an
honest broker amidst contending local parties, or a
voice for persecuted Catholic communities, or a channel
for humanitarian assistance. But whatever the situation,
the first task of the pope’s representative to another
sovereignty is to help maintain free space for the
Church’s evangelical, sacramental, educational and
charitable missions, all of which are essential to what it
means to be “the Catholic Church” in any human
situation.
This unique character can create unique challenges;
two such challenges today involve Cuba and China.
In Cuba, the role played by Vatican officials and the
archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, in
facilitating the recent agreement between the United
States and Cuba to restore full diplomatic relations has
significantly raised the stakes for how the local Church
in Cuba, and the Holy See, play their respective hands
in the last days of the Castro regime.
Those “last days” may, alas, be a matter of years;
still, that Castroism has no future seems obvious to
everyone except the brothers Castro. Some Catholic
leaders in Cuba are understandably concerned to use
what openings may now be available
to build up the Church’s
infrastructure in that long-suffering
island. But if that build-up involves
a kind of relationship with the
present Cuban regime that precludes
strong, vocal and visible Catholic
support for those hard-pressed
Cuban human rights activists who
form the core of the post-communist
Cuban civil society of the future, the
evangelical mission of the Church
in a post-Castro Cuba could be
seriously imperiled.
Building-while-resisting, and
thus helping accelerate the change toward a post-Castro
future: that is the challenge for Cuban Catholicism,
which will face the daunting task of re-converting Cuba
in the 21st century. The local Church should be firmly
supported in both aspects of that work, the building and
the resisting, by the Holy See.
Then there’s the new thaw in the Holy See’s
relations with the People’s Republic of China. It’s no
secret that senior Vatican diplomats have long sought
full diplomatic exchange at the ambassadorial level
with the PRC; the theory is that such diplomatic
recognition will give the Catholic Church a more
secure place at the table as China determines its future.
But here, too, there are evangelical concerns to be
considered.
Full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and
the PRC would require the Vatican to sever its
diplomatic ties with Taiwan -- the first Chinese
democracy in that ancient country’s 5,000-year history.
And while there is nothing inexorable about a transition
to democracy in mainland China, there does seem
something inherently unstable about communist
regimes -- especially if they’ve been sitting atop a
substantial middle class that’s not going to accept
political disenfranchisement indefinitely. If and when a
Chinese democratic revolution happens, too close a
relationship with a faltering communist regime with a
long history of persecuting Christians and pro-
democracy activists could be an obstacle to the
evangelization of China -- which, when it fully opens
itself to the world, will be the greatest field of Christian
mission since the Europeans came to the western
hemisphere in the 16th century.
We may be sure that Evangelical Protestants and
Mormons, who will not be burdened by having had
diplomatic relations with the PRC, are already thinking
hard about their missions in a post-communist China.
That, too, should concentrate Catholic minds on how
the alleged benefits of a deal between the Vatican and
the current regime in Beijing are to be weighed against
the potential perils to the new evangelization in a post-
communist China.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C.
The
Catholic
Difference
Weigel
Evangelical challenges for Vatican diplomacy
I write these words on the one
hundredth anniversary of the birth
of Thomas Merton, one of the great-
est spiritual writers of the 20th cen-
tury and a man who had a decisive
influence on me and my vocation to
the priesthood. I first encountered
Merton’s writing in a peculiar way.
My brother and I were both work-
ing at a bookstore in the Chicago
suburbs. One afternoon, he tossed to
me a tattered paperback with a torn
cover that the manager had decided
to discard. My brother said, “You might like this; it’s
written by a Trappist monk.” I replied, with the blithe
confidence of a sixteen year old, “I don’t want to read a
book by some Buddhist.” With exquisite sensitivity, he
responded, “Trappists are Catholics, you idiot.”
The book in question was
The Seven Storey Moun-
tain
, Thomas Merton’s passionate, articulate, smart,
and deeply moving account of his journey from world-
ling to Trappist monk. Though much of the philosophy
and theology was, at that time, over my head, I became
completely caught up in the drama and romance of
Merton’s story, which is essentially the tale of how a
man fell in love with God. The book is extraordinarily
well-written, funny, adventurous, and spiritually wise.
In one of the blurbs written for the first edition, Fulton
Sheen referred to it as a contemporary version of St.
Augustine’s Confessions, and it was fulsomely praised
by both Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Moreover,
it contributed massively to the startling influx of young
men into monasteries and religious communities across
the United States in the postwar era.
I was so thrilled by my first encounter with Mer-
ton that I dove headlong into his body of writing.
The
Sign of Jonas
, a journal that Merton kept in the years
leading up to his priestly ordination, became a particu-
lar favorite. That work concludes with an essay called
“Firewatch: July 4, 1952,”
which Jacques Maritain re-
ferred to as the greatest piece of spiritual writing in the
twentieth century. In this powerful meditation, Merton
uses the mundane monastic task of walking through the
monastery checking for fires as a metaphor for a Dan-
tesque examination of the soul.
The Sign of Jonas
is
marked by Merton’s playful and ironic sense of humor,
but it also gives evidence of the enormous range of his
reading and intellectual interests. To devour that book
as a nineteen year old, as I did, was to receive an un-
paralleled cultural education. For many people of my
generation, Merton opened the door to the wealth of the
Catholic spiritual tradition: I first learned about John
of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Bernard
of Clairvaux, Odo of Cluny, the Victorines, Origen,
Thérèse of Lisieux, and Hans Urs von Balthasar from
him.
Perhaps the central theme of all of Merton’s writings
is contemplation. What he stressed over and again in re-
gard to this crucial practice is that it is not the exclusive
preserve of spiritual athletes, but rather something that
belongs to all the baptized and that stands at the heart
of Christian life. For contemplation is, in his language,
“to find the place in you where you are here and now
being created by God.” It is consciously to discover a
new center in God and hence at the same time to dis-
cover the point of connection to everyone and every-
thing else in the cosmos. Following the French spiritual
masters, Merton called this le point vierge, the virginal
point, or to put it in the language of the fourth Gospel,
“water bubbling up in you to eternal life.” In his famous
epiphanic experience at the corner of 4th and Walnut
in downtown Louisville, Merton felt, through le point
vierge, a connection to the ordinary passersby so pow-
erful it compelled him to exclaim, “There is no way of
telling people that they are all walking around shining
like the sun.”
SEE FATHER BARRON, PAGE 14
The hundredth anniversary of Thomas Merton’s birth
Word on
Fire
Fr. Barron
