✣ Highlights from the week online
Luther’s theology was rooted in his anguish The traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli republished an account by Bishop William Adrian of Nashville – originally published in the Wanderer 50 years ago – of the life of Martin Luther. Bishop Adrian argued that the heart of Luther’s thought was the denial that man can avoid sin. He quoted the historian Mgr Peter Guilday as saying that Luther was obsessed with his own inability “to overcome sin”, and so launched a new theology in which man’s efforts were nothing and God’s will everything. As a young monk, Luther struggled with anguish at the idea of losing his soul. He overworked, and wrote to a friend: “I seldom have time for reciting the Divine Office and celebrating Mass.” Reading William of Ockham, a medieval thinker condemned by the Church, was a turning point for Luther: there he found the idea that God’s will was supreme, and unpredictable. God could as readily command a man to hate God as to love him. So, Luther said, one can do nothing to avoid sin; all that counts is whether God chooses to save us. In defending his new theology, “Luther became more bold, more proud, more vulgar. He thought himself inspired – that only he spoke the truth. When he was excommunicated by Leo X in 1521, he became very bitter toward the Papacy, and called it the agent of the devil – the anti-Christ.” Is there a ‘war’ against Pope Francis? Andrew Brown of the Guardian wrote that the debates over Communion for the divorced and remarried had brought the Church to its most serious crisis in decades. Brown claimed that, among bishops, “between a quarter and a third” are passively resisting Francis’s work, “and a small minority are doing so actively”. But, he added, the more it seemed Francis was changing the teaching of his predecessors – specifically St John Paul II – “the easier it becomes for a successor to reverse his”. He concluded: “No one can know whether his successor will attempt to contradict him – and on that question, the future of the Catholic Church now hangs.” The clever language of the alt-right is a trap At Carrots for Michaelmas, Haley Stewart warned Catholics to be careful of the alt-right. Some in the movement have produced imagery which seems appealing to Catholics – for instance, using a John Paul II quotation: “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.” But the alt-right means something very different from what Catholics would mean. Stewart advised: “Be sceptical of language that calls for the salvation of “Western civilisation” … when these people are talking about saving “the West”, what they mean is preserving white power. And their support for large families is not in John Paul’s line – “it’s merely because big white families produce lots of white babies”.
