August 8, 2024 • 69 mins
This week on The Open Door (August 7th) we will explore the thought of Servant of God Romano Guardini, a widely influential theologian whom both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis deeply admired. So did Flannery O’Connor! Guardini is often thought of as a unifying figure in the Church. Our welcome guest is Christine Myers Miller. She is a graduate of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family in Washington, DC, and is the Director of Adult Faith Formation, Marriage & Family Life at St. Bernard of Clairvaux Parish in Tulsa. Dr. Myers Miller researched Romano Guardini for her doctoral thesis, studying the topic of Christian responsibility for the world. She has published essays in the Catechetical Review, Humanum online review, and in the important theological journal Communio. Among the questions we’ll ask are the following.
- Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Have you always been an Okie?
- What was it like to study at the John Paul II Institute? How does the Institute reflect the vision of St. John Paul II?
- What are your responsibilities as Director of Adult Faith Formation and Marriage & Family Life at your parish?
- Could you introduce us to Romano Guardini? A time-line would help. And how did he survive World War II?
- In these “interesting times” there’s deep disagreement on just what it is to be a human being. What does this mean in terms of how we can best address ethical questions?
- On your view, crisis can be an occasion of growth. How might this come about with regard to scandals in the Church?
- Romano Guardini saw the apparent contradiction between faith and science as one of the main sources of crisis in his time, and it surely remains one for us. How might we effectively respond to it?
- How might Guardini advise us to manage AI technology?
- You have written that “faith needs culture to survive” and warned that “a faith without culture is a dying thing.” What would a Catholic culture look like today?
- Might it involve a distinctive Catholic political presence?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to WCAT radio. You're home for authentic Catholic programming.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Please join us at the Open Door. We discuss solidarity, subsidiarity,
economic democracy, in non violence in light of Catholic social teaching.
We explore how to move from discussion to political change.
Culture and politics, to be sure, are interwoven, so we
care deeply about education and the arts. Our questions often
(00:29):
lead us to report on the projects and promise of
the American Solidarity Party.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to the Open Door. Jim Hannick here with fellow
panelists Christopher Zender Tristemente the list that Amiga Valerie Niemeier
as a back to school conflict and claiming that she
lacks the power of bylocation, we can only say that
(00:59):
we will miss her now. Today we are going to
explore the thought of Servant of God Romano Gardini, a
widely influential theologian whom both Pope Benedict the sixteenth and
Pope Francis deeply admired. B. T. W. Soded Flannery O'Connor.
(01:26):
Guardini is often thought of as a unifying figure in
the church. Our welcome guest is Christine Myers Miller. She
is a graduate of the Pontifical John Paul Two Institute
for Studies in Marriage and Family in Washington, d C.
(01:47):
And is the director of Adult Faith, Formation, Marriage and
Family Life at Saint Bernard of Clairvaux Parish in Tulsa.
Meyers Miller research Roma Gardini in Depth for her doctoral
thesis studying the topic of Christian responsibility for the world.
(02:12):
She has published essays in the Catechetical Review, Humanum Online Review,
and in the important theological journal Communio. Let's begin, as
we always do in prayer. Come, Holy Spirit, Fill the
(02:35):
hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire
of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they shall
be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray, Oh God, who have taught the hearts
of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit,
(02:56):
grant that in the same spirit we may be true,
wise and ever rejoice in His consolation through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
To get us started, Christine, could you tell us a
bit about yourself and have you always been in Oakie?
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Well, I do come from Okie Stock So my family
has been in Oklahoma for I don't know, maybe about
one hundred years, and my dad worked in oil, so
we moved around a bit when I was growing up,
but the family settled back in Oklahoma again in the
nineties and I finished growing up here to middle school
and high school in Oklahoma and love Oklahoma. So it's
(03:45):
really a great place. So I know sometimes the middle
of the country gets called the flyover zone, but I
wouldn't live anywhere else, So I'm happy to fly to
the coast and visit, but I'm very happy to live
in Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
So your view is better sooner than later.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Well, I didn't attend school in Oklahoma, so I'm not
a part of the great competition between Oklahoma State and
the University of Oklahoma. But that is that's a popular
rivalry around here. So we take our sports pretty seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah. Well, all right, so Christopher, our guest has kindly
introduced herself. Do you want to carry us forward?
Speaker 5 (04:31):
Now let's begin. One thing she didn't mentioned is she
studied at the John pull the Second Institute. Maybe she
could describe for us what that was like and the
institution how it reflects the thought of John the Second.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Yeah, I'd love to. So this is a wonderful place
to study. It's really a gym in the life of
the church. Theologically, they have a very balanced approach, so
they're steeped in the tradition but open to the new
contributions in philosophy and theology that were brought by the
(05:06):
Pontificate of John Paul the Second, and right now in
the church that doesn't describe every theological institute. So their
fidelity and then also their receptivity to the Pontificate of
John Paul two, I think is very important for the
Church as a whole and for the Church here in
the United States. So they're focused very much on receiving
(05:27):
John Paul the Second's insight, which is tied deeply to
the Second Vatican Council, that you can really only understand
the human person in terms of love, that human beings
were created from love and for love. That Christ has
revealed to us the reality of God, a triune God,
one substantially but a communion of persons, and whose life
(05:51):
is love, and that really love has everything to do
with truth, and truth has everything to do with love.
These two things go together, and they provide the foundation
for a very rich anthropology that touches not only on
human sexuality, the body, gender, issues marriage and family life,
but really work, economy, the nature of our being embodied
(06:15):
in the world. And it's a wonderful place to study,
so very it's very challenging. They drive drive their students
pretty hard to go deep in philosophy and theology, but
it's a very rewarding place to study. So I'm grateful
for my time there. I would say that I went
there already very much convicted of my Catholic faith and
(06:41):
my desire to be a disciple of Christ and to
follow him wherever he led me. But the John Pelto
Institute helped me understand the world. It helped me understand
kind of the shape of our modern world, how it
related to the ancient and medieval world, Christendom, and the
Christian faith, and really brought a kind of healing to
(07:05):
me because I went there realizing that there was a
disconnect between the faith that I was pursuing and living
and the world that I was living in, and it
was hard for me to reconcile them. There were things
about the Catholic faith that I couldn't I couldn't understand,
I couldn't incorporate into a whole vision or a synthesis
of how I understood reality, and my studies at the
(07:27):
Jompole Institute helped me kind of diagnose that and grow
in an understanding which deepened my convictions, my faith convictions,
and gave my mind a place to rest. So I'm
grateful for that. It was beautiful. I hope many students
will go there. So maybe someone listening to this podcast
will catch the bug and go to the John Paul
(07:47):
Too Institute. That would please me very much.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
You talking about so it sounds like what you're saying
before you went there. You see, your mind was formed
by what it seemed to be reality, at least the
modern modern reality. What sort of things? What was the
boned contention between what you were thinking and what the
Catholic Church was teaching.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, I think you know, I was public school educated.
I was not Catholic school educated, so public schools K
through twelve, and then I attended Vanderbilt for my undergraduate
and did secondary education in English as my major. I
love literature and already had a sense of like the
ascetic and beauty and symbolism that drew me very much.
(08:32):
But I just I think imbibed a lot of relativism
also a kind of skepticism about our ability to know
reality or know the truth.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
This.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
I remember sitting in middle school science class and learning
that the desk in front of you isn't a desk.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It is.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
A conglomerate of molecules and pieces and parts. It has
no wholeness of itself. It's spackled, you know, material meaningless
material that's spackled together. And now you call it a desk.
And I think, because of the kind of intellect that
I have, I absorb that very deeply as a way
(09:14):
to understand the world, how to understand reality. That you know,
that's very much a Cartesian view of the material world,
that it's all random pieces that are have been grouped
together to form something. It's very different from a classical
understanding of form and that things have natures and their
intelligible et cetera. So I loved Aristotle. When I read
(09:38):
Aristotle at the JP two Institute, it was like he
gave me the world back because he said, you know,
if you want to know the world, open your eyes
and observe it. It speaks, it's intelligible, it tells you
about itself. You don't have to doubt your ability to
come to a common sense knowledge of what things are.
Everything doesn't have to be held in doubt, deconstructed and
(09:58):
reconstructed based on on experimentation or something. So that for
me was very liberating to realize that there was so
many things that I could know by a careful, attentive, humble,
obedient observation of reality. I think that I had been
(10:20):
taught to be skeptical of everything, and that's that leads
you to nihilism and to a place of really profound
self doubt as well, because you don't know how to
grasp the truth, and we have a great need of
truth as human beings. So I'm not sure if I
answered your question.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
But well what I want to know right off is
in that whole process, where are you left with the
unpaid bills on your desk?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Well, God has been very good to me, so I
managed to go through all of this, you know, education,
with coming free of debt. So that's a great thing.
And I've been liberated then to be able to serve
the church. So the unpaid bills on my desk are
paid by Saint Bernard of Clervaux Parish, and here I
(11:13):
have a beautiful assignment to bring the Catholic faith to
adults and to support marriage and family life in our parish.
So that's my task, and that's how I earn my
bread and butter.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Could you give us some particulars on your position. What
does it involve?
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Yeah, Well, it's sort of a dream position in many
ways because I have an enormous freedom to provide programming
for adults, and so I have the joy of being
able to prayerfully discern where I believe God is asking us,
to study what He's wanting us to do, and then
to draw together classes. So I usually provide a couple
of classes throughout the year at different times of day,
(11:56):
morning and evening to reach people who are retire They
can come during the day very easily, and prefer that
also people who are still working, they'll come in the evenings.
We provide childcare for evening programming for parents so that
they can be hands free and their children are entrusted
to competent, loving adults, and they then are free to
(12:18):
apply their minds and their hearts to what's set before them.
So it's exciting. Our diocese actually just went to restored order.
Our bishop announced that here in the preceding months that
we're returning to a restored order of the sacrament. So
that means that by twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine,
I forget what the goal is, our children will receive
(12:41):
confirmation and for so holy communion in third grade. This
puts a lot of pressure on us to give really
quality formation and also to form our parents, because obviously
there's no carot to entice them to bring their children
for a later confirmation or a stick to beat them with,
so we have to actually provide them with something that
(13:01):
they find meaningful. So it's a welcome challenge because the
faith of parents is essential to the handing on of
the faith to children. They have a contribution that nobody
can make but them, and so we want to equip
them to do that with conviction and joy. So that's
the task that's laid before me and my coworkers here,
(13:21):
so we're happy to take it up with God's help.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Now you mentioned freedom, has the absence of monsign Pat
Gallous anster freedom or not? Or is he's still looking
in the background. You might remember, audience that Monsignor Gallus
(13:49):
was a recent guest of ours, and he's removed himself
to a monkery, I mean a monastery.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Monsignor Gallus is a wonderful man, very deeply loved here
at Saint Bernard's and in the Diocese of Tulsa and
Eastern Oklahoma more broadly so and very much by me.
He's been a spiritual father to me. So he hired
me here in twenty fifteen and has been a spiritual
director and guide and friend and father to me for
all these years. So whenever he asks me to do
(14:18):
something that I'm always ready to follow. So I was
very happy that you are a longtime friend of his,
and so grateful to be invited to be a part
of your podcast through him.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I don't know, just a brief side here and a
side bar. He has recently upended Chesterton research.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Oh no, oh, that's great.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Actually unpublished poem. An unpublished poem, Fragment. Fragment was analyzed
carefully in a recent issue of Guililbert, and it turned
out the analysis was not quite up to snuff, and
(15:10):
so one senior wrote a letter to the editor Dale Alquist,
pointing out that there would be a better way to
decipher the handwriting that Dale himself had tried to decipher
to reconstitute this poem. So he's a literary expert as well.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Yes, so that's a great contribution that he's making to
chesterton research. And he he is witty and intelligent like Chesterton.
I'm sure that there's a supernatural friendship there between the
two of them. So that's a delight. I think he
mentioned to me that he made that discovery, so congratulations.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah, they were both of them, well senior still, but
they were both of them Chesterton and in an early fashion,
committed to the Predican.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Diet, the Predican diet. What is this?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
No, Chesterton was not committed to the predicate diet. He
was a beard vacant man from beginning to end. Christopher,
could you get us back on track please?
Speaker 5 (16:21):
We should probably start talking about Romano Gardini. Oh maybe
could you know somebody? Uh, people might not I have
actually ever read Romano Garny, So so an introduction is fine.
I mean, especially explain to people why and Italians writing
in German?
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, so he Romanic Guardini is just he's a great
figure of the recent of recent history, and often figures
of recent history are the most forgotten. So but there
has been a little bit of a revival of interest
in Guardini, and a lot of his works aren't translated
into English. So I had the joy in my doctoral
studies of discovering a lot of his untranslated works and
(17:00):
reading them in the original And I'd love to see
more of them translated at some point so that we
can benefit from his work. But he was born in
eighteen eighty five in Verona, Italy, to an Italian family. Obviously,
he's the oldest of four boys. His father was a merchant,
so he did trade work. He was also involved in
(17:21):
diplomacy for the Italian government. When Guardini was just a
year old, they moved to Maitz, Germany, and Guardini grew
up there. Of all of the Guardini siblings, he was
the only one that really felt German, so he was
formed so deeply by the culture of the people the
intellectual climate there that he stayed. He took German citizenship.
(17:46):
He was studied at Tubingen as a youth, experienced a
very profound conversion in that time, and along with a
childhood friend, entered seminary and was ordained to the priesthood
in nineteen ten. During his habilitation studies at Bond, he
(18:07):
wrote an article for Maria Locke Abbey, so the abbot
there Ildefond's herr Weger. He was part of the German
liturgical movement, a real inspirer of it, and invited Guardini
to write an article. He wrote Spirit of the Liturgy
nineteen eighteen. So this is probably his most famous work.
(18:27):
And if you're familiar very much with the corpus of Ratzinger,
Cardinal Ratzinger Benedicta the sixteenth, you know that his work
on the liturgy borrows the title Spirit of the Liturgy.
He took that from Guardini with the hopes that his
work would in some way participate in the same sort
of renewal that Guardini's work in nineteen eighteen inspired. There
(18:48):
was a lot of enthusiasm about improving the lay person's
ability to participate in this great act of the Church,
the worship, the Holy Liturgy of the Church. So that
springboarded him into kind of a position of fame in
(19:08):
nineteen eighteen. He was a very young man at the time.
He also, about the same time was introduced to the
German youth movement quickborn, so Germany in between the wars
saw a lot of renewal of youth who really wanted
a different life for themselves. The First World War was
very traumatic to Germany. Germany was blamed for it. There
(19:31):
was much poverty, there was a lot of kind of
low morale, and the young people of the time were
really searching for a way forward and a new identity
and something to latch onto, something to inspire them. Of course,
that created, unfortunately a fertile ground for national socialism and
(19:51):
the Nazi movement, which started to gain control and influence
in the minds and hearts of people at that time.
But it was also a fertile ground for a renewal
of Catholic faith and life, and so Guardini was a
part of this youth movement. Quickborn was a leader of
it for many years. He was in Let's see what
(20:14):
year was that? I took a few notes here. In
nineteen twenty three a position was created for him at
the University of Berlin. So the Prussian Minister of Culture
created a Catholic veltenshallong a chair for him that just
means worldview, and invited him to this professorship at the
(20:34):
University of Berlin, where Guardini was enormously popular. So what
he did he studied dogmatics for his doctoral work. But
what he did as a professor is he took the
light of faith that he received from his conviction, his
Catholic convictions, and the purity with which he received the
teachings of the Church, and he allowed that light of
faith to shine upon earthly realities, realities of culture, maybe
(21:02):
questions of the faith, but to examine them with a
kind of freshness. He had a phenomenological approach, which was
also the school of phenomenology was really taking off in
between the wars as well as well as personalism. The
dramas that Europe suffered in the twentieth century really gave
(21:24):
birth to a renewed sense of the need to regain
contact with reality, which is what phenomenology was trying to do.
Regain contact with real things and come to know what
they were. And personalism really wanted to recover the dignity
of the human person, which had been denied and denigrated
(21:45):
by these totalitarian regimes and fascism, which had crushed so
many and come to see the individual as something less
important than the whole in a way that was harmful
to man and caused great suffering. So Guardini was living
right in the of all of these movements, and his
lectures were enormously popular. He would be in large lecture halls,
(22:07):
they'd be packed with students, Catholics, non Catholics. Berlin is
not a Catholic city. It was a Protestant city at
the time. Since then it's been very much influenced by
being behind the Soviet Bloc and communism. So this was
not a Catholic atmosphere in which he was living. But
his work was so interesting that it drew a wide
(22:30):
variety of people. He taught them to seek the truth
was very important to Guardini. Is really the heart of
his life's work was to pursue truth, to know it profoundly,
and that truth in the light of faith, to combine
those together. It was very fascinating to many people. So
(22:52):
he was shut down from that position in nineteen thirty nine.
So as the National Socialist regime took power, they pulled
him into the office and explained to him that when
the government has a worldview, there's no Catholic worldview taught
in the university. His name was put on a death
list by the Nazis. However, Guardini was so famous and
(23:14):
also an international figure because he was Italian by birth,
and very obviously Italian in his look and also his name.
You couldn't escape that he was not a native German,
and these things put him sort of on a little
bit of protection from an immediate extermination by the Nazi regime.
(23:37):
But nevertheless his positions were stripped from him. The German
youth movement as well was shut down in nineteen thirty nine.
They had to go and try to destroy documentation that
would cause them to be especially suspect by the Nazi Party,
and everything became a bit quiet. Guardini spent those war
(23:57):
years really focusing on his intellectual work, and it was
very productive actually for him.
Speaker 5 (24:03):
So how would you were talking about being a phenomenologist,
how would you how would his procedure theologically and philosophically
differ from say Thomas Aquinas or maybe the Neotomas.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Well, I think he differs from. So Aquitas is a realist, right,
so he believes there's an objective reality and that knowledge
comes from a reception of an objective world. That is
a very different position than what we find as the
rise of modernity comes about. So the work of Descartes
casts doubt on our senses and what we can honestly
(24:45):
know through common experience, and there's a desire to only
confirm and know what can be experimented upon and verified
by data. Phenomenology wants to recover that objective reality that
there there is a world before us, and that this
world presents itself, and that we are capable of experiencing
(25:07):
it and growing and knowledge with it. So he differs
from Aquinas in the sense that Guardini was not very
interested in doing scholarly work, which would require a comparison
of thought among different scholars how they've interpreted things in
an analysis of that. Thomas Aquinas was an absolute master
and genius, and doing precisely that. He brought into dialogue
(25:31):
the ancient philosophers Aristotle, in particular through at his time
the recent discovery rediscovery of the works of Aristotle through
Muslim philosophers. So Quinas was absorbing Aristotle via Muslim philosophers
and bringing them into dialogue with Christian theologians, the great
(25:51):
Christian theologians of his time, and then commenting through his
own prayer and contemplation and discernment upon their contraybutiance. He's
absolute master at that. That's why he's the Angelic doctor
and is so important for the theological work of the time.
But Guardini what he wanted to do was regain contact,
(26:13):
like a fresh contact with reality, a fresh observation of it,
realizing that the contribution that he would give wouldn't necessarily
be of the caliber of a Thomas Aquinas or a
scholarly level, but it's a It does, though, have a
kind of freshness and newness to it that provides a
(26:35):
kind of a renewed wonder and a renewed contact with
the world that we desperately need. If we become so
subjective that we think that we're creating the meaning of
the world, and Guardini helps correct that. It's like, no,
the world itself has something to say to you and
(26:57):
is profound and beautiful and wondrous, and you needed to
get back into touch with what's outside of you and
allow that to enrich the inside of you. But but
you know, we're not the creators of the world. We
are inheritors, we are beneficiaries, we're recipients of this beautiful world.
So so that would be kind of a distinction. Both
(27:20):
kinds of thought have a contribution to make, I think,
to the life of the church and the life of
the mind. They're just they're distinct contributions though that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
Well, yeah, I guess because I wonder about is that
Thomas was, along with Aristotle, said all knowledge begins with experience.
So actually it's I mean, even though forms of sclass
and became corrupt and began to be too much rooted
in what the what the expert at the end of
(27:51):
the past experts and said the past thinkers. Nevertheless, that's
actually the foundation of tumism. That's where you're talking to me,
a really a semi realist, you know, you the natures
of things are actually present in the things themselves, so
we can actually experience them, they come to know them.
So I guess I wonder they use the term phenomenology too,
(28:13):
seem to suggest the pot's phenomena, which is not reality
at all. That's just the perception of reality. So is
it would it be right to say that Guardini's approach
is more effective, effective with a and more more maybe
almost poetic in terms of trying to get people to
(28:35):
rediscover what had been lost in an earlier familier earlier tradition.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
I do think that it would be, uh, it would
be accurate to describe his approach as as poetic as
long as you maintain the depth of his work that
it's not simply so, it's not romanticism, and it's not subjectivism.
So he comes to an approach to the world that
(29:03):
is still informed by the richness of the Catholic tradition
in the Western tradition is still behind him and inside
of his vision. There's not an opposition there between Guardini
or his version of phenomenology and Tomism, for example, and
the approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas. So his real gift
(29:26):
was to allow the light of faith to shine upon
earthly realities, and in that new things come into vision
that perhaps you wouldn't have seen otherwise about the human
person or about a work of literature. So I don't
know if that helps, but it's not simply a His
(29:48):
pursuit wasn't for say, beauty or emotion or but he
really wanted truth. So it's not simply to capture an
experience of aarticular emotion, et cetera, but to really get
to the heart of things. So, and to do so
in a way that is I think poetic would be
(30:09):
accurate in for some of his work.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, I have a I guess a follow up question
on method, But then I want to go ahead. You'd
mentioned theological anthropology earlier, and I want to go ahead
to that, But first the follow up question. You might
(30:36):
say that as a phenomenologist, Guardini calls us to a
fresh vision of how things are in themselves. It's a
(30:57):
vision that frames our experience in a new way. We
see deeper. Now, might someone in a deflationary mood perish
the thought? But it's early here in Los Angeles. Might
(31:21):
someone in a deflationary mood say yes, but that's all descriptive.
And suppose someone says to me, I don't see things
the way you see things, And I'm all for seeing things,
but I don't see things the way you see things.
(31:44):
How do we ever move forward from a discourse that
is descriptive to the drawing of conclusions or the resolution
shouldn't have ant enemies?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
Yeah, and I think that that is the great challenge
that we have now, especially with the kind of subjective
emphasis that we have in our culture, especially with freedom
in the individual vision, the desire to create my life
according to how I want it to be. There's an orientation,
(32:25):
like in our culture toward reality that's very much intent
upon shaping and upon directing it according to my will.
So if you will a kind of freedom that is
unhinged from a reception of truth. So when that is
first and foremost, then the dialogue and the pursuit of
(32:47):
truth becomes very difficult. So there is a sort of
personal asceticism that has to be in place for the
pursuit of truth, in which you allow truth to shape you,
and you humbly place yourself beneath the search for reality
and what it is, and you subject yourself to it.
(33:07):
That doesn't fully solve all of the problem of it,
of course, but it's absolutely essential. This is where, like
often the idea of pursuing truth in our culture today
sounds proud. Remember that I presented an article by Guardini
to a group of people here in Tulsa who are
(33:28):
involved in the community as leaders in the community, religious
and community leaders of other types, and this article about
truthfulness was seen as very proud. But actually it's the
opposite of that, because when you hold to the fact
that there's an objective reality that we are both trying
to understand, then we must humble ourselves before it, and
(33:52):
I must allow myself to be changed by what I see,
and I have to take my inter lockrator seriously and
really address their concerns and what their vision is. That
that's sort of the Sina Kwannon. There's no dialogue without
that kind of personal attitude toward the truth, and in
(34:13):
a culture that we have now, that's sort of a
rare attitude, and I think that's part of our trouble
in pursuing the dialogue, is that if you're not willing
to let your vision be altered, then it's hard to
enter into a conversation with someone and find unity. Barnini
does talk about this and some of his later works
(34:36):
about the challenge that we face in pursuing truth because
he's very influenced by a Plato on this. But there's
an abundance of truth, and that means that there are
multiple perspectives that you can have on something, and sometimes
coming to a unity or to a decision, a decisive
point about a particular topic is difficult. But he would
(34:59):
say we must guard ourselves from a kind of skepticism
that would, because of this abundance of what we're looking
at together and the difficulty of the task, that we
would simply put it aside. We nevertheless must pursue it.
It's absolutely essential to the work of a university, for example,
or to a society, that we would conform ourselves to
(35:21):
what is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Perhaps, and every analogy limps. Perhaps we could speak of
the esthetic reception of a work of art. Vision is
(35:45):
certainly involved, and we find ourselves seeing things back to
the things in very different ways. But we have to
stand before the thing. If you take one view of
Caravaggio and I take another, well, let's make sure that
(36:08):
we're viewing the actual work and keep returning to the
actual work. So perhaps that would be a way to
ground dialogue. And I think of a famous line from
John Paul two, let's call things by their proper names.
(36:34):
We have to be before them. But that's a digression
on a digression. Now you mentioned theological anthropology, and as
I understand your way of thinking about that and Guardini's
before you can wrestle with the great moral issues of
(36:57):
the day, and they're all as great moral issues of
the day, and sometimes they're just avoided and not wrestled with.
And I think of slavery as an example of one.
You have to have an understanding of who the human
person is and today, we have very different views of
(37:22):
what it is to be a human being. I mean
back to your desk, right, well say it with being
a human being. So how do you move from questions
about what it is to be a human being to
questions about how to live as a human being.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
Well, you know, there was a comment that Guardini made
towards the end of his career. So after World War
Two he was reinstated in the university so First and
Tubingen as a Catholic Weltenschaung professor. He was given his
chair back, the same idea of chair. Then a few
years later he was wooed by Munich and brought back
(38:09):
to Munich and he continued in his professorship through the
early nineteen sixties. And so he saw he saw the
changes that were occurring in society and the you know,
the post World War two era. And and part of
what he noted was when when confusion reims, we must
(38:30):
return to the simplest things and the most basic realities,
and we must look at them carefully. And so just
exactly to your point about if you're going to discuss
a work of art, place the work of art directly
before you. If you're going to look at the human person,
place the human person before you and look at the
(38:52):
different aspects of human life, and the different sciences have
different contributions to make to this. An apology in this vision,
I would say, with one caveat, is that the scientific
enterprise can't be subjected to ulterior motives. And I'm afraid
that we're seeing that very often in society right now,
(39:13):
that if you're scientists, and the natural sciences or the
soft sciences, the social sciences are allowing themselves to be
shaped by ulterior motives career careerism, or monetary gain or
(39:35):
bribes or self promotion, and it's falsifying their work such
that they're publishing articles that are not honest and not truthful.
Here we have a complete breakdown of knowledge. And when
you're in that situation, then what you do is you
create so much confusion that no one even knows where
(39:56):
to find reliable information. And the pursuit then of man's
good becomes merely impossible when each person in their proper
domain does not to have integrity in what they're doing
and pursue honestly the truth before them, to know the
truth and to really express it as clearly and as
(40:19):
accurately as they can when that does happen, though it doesn't,
there are contributions that come from all sides. So I
can give an example, and I wish I knew the
woman's name. I didn't prepare this because I had no
idea that we would like you wander off into these waters.
But there was a woman who did research on the
(40:39):
development of infants and small children. And she was not
by any means a conservative person or a Christian believer,
or she was a scientist, and she had secular views
that are very common in our times. But what she
observed was the need of a young child for its mother.
That children have underdeveloped undeveloped nervous systems, and the regulation
(41:04):
of their emotions comes through contact with their mother. Their
mother is actually the one that regulates the emotional response
of a child all the way through about age three.
And the implications of that, of course for working moms,
is very clear. Her research was therefore rejected because it
doesn't fit with the desire of a particular form of culture,
(41:28):
a particular understanding of woman in her place in the world.
And she had a terrible time publishing this work and
maintaining her academic career because it didn't fit with an ideology.
That's a problem. When we can't be honest about what's
before us and speak truthfully about our findings and really
(41:48):
observe them honestly and describe them accurately, then we cannot
pursue our authentic good and that causes a complete breakdown
in our society. And so I give that as an example,
because this isn't This is a beautiful thing I think
about the Catholic faith. It's part of what captured my
heart and my mind as a young person. The Church
(42:13):
maintains that the truths, the natural truths of this world,
are not in conflict with the truths of faith, and
they must all be pursued honestly. At times there may
be difficult reconciling them to one another, understanding how they
fit together, but we hold in principle that there is
no contradiction there. It also means that persons who do
(42:33):
not share are supernatural beliefs that are beyond the scope
of reason still have a place at the table and
conversation about understanding the human person and building a society.
So what's most essential is that inner integrity the pursuit
of truth and authentic good, which is an ethical principle
(42:55):
that is accessible to reason. That is a hallmark of
ancient philosophy, the pre Christian philosophy that's not inspired by
divine revelation and is not an offshoot of Christianity per se,
but has found a home within the Catholic tradition. So
that's enormously important, and that's I think a contribution that
(43:16):
the Catholic faith makes to the world that is extraordinarily
valuable on every level, politically, scientifically, whatever it does that
you're doing to be honest, be truthful, pursue the.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Good, right and truth remains the pivot.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Yes, and it requires humility and obedience. It requires well,
it requires a conviction that the truth is worth pursuing
and that you have an obligation to it. So it's
very refreshing whenever you discover the work of a scientist
(43:57):
or or a thinker who is convicted of that and
stands by it, their work brings light and is helpful
to us.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
Yeah. M Christopher, it's interesting. We talk about truth and
you're asking people to respond to truth. But even in
the roots of empirical science, if you go back to
like Bacon, his his adage that truth is power. Right,
(44:30):
knowledge is power. When you talk about people who refuse
to listen to the results a certain experimentation because it
it goes against their own interests or against their own ideas,
I think what you're looking at is a is a
what you might call a postmodern view of what truth.
(44:52):
The truth is only what truth is it is a
grasp of power. So the this is simple we're talking
about is deeply rooted in the corruption of philosophical thought
in the West, since you know, the seventeenth century. How
do we when you when you're dealing with that kind
(45:12):
of thing where every truth claim is merely considered to
be a power claim. And I can therefore, you know,
silence somebody who had says something I disagree with or
is not in my interest to hold simply because of
that reality. How is there any is there any kind
of dialogue that could be had with that kind of society.
Speaker 4 (45:36):
Well, I'm afraid that that's a dialogue that often ends
in the blood of martyrs. So where where there is
no reception to uh to the truth proclaimed, then it
can come to blows. Of course, might makes right in
the end, right, which is the kind of society that
that we're living in right now. I would say, though,
(45:56):
that we have to be careful to not despair of
the power of truth's beauty. And when it is presented well,
it has it has a power to convict. So, you know,
I at the John Paltoon Institute became very familiar with
the work of Hans Er Schwan Balthazar, which I have
(46:20):
some misgivings about in some ways, but I will say
this about about his work is that he helps restore
an understanding of the importance of the transcendental attributes of being,
that the world, that everything that exists shares and shares,
and being shares in those transcend transcendental attributes of truth, goodness, want, unity,
and beauty. From my own experience, what I came to
(46:43):
understand as a young person in you know, attempting dialogues
across lines of faith and conviction, was that when I
explained the truth to someone, but I failed to show
truth's goodness, I failed to bring forward how this truth
(47:06):
that I wanted to share I wanted to talk about
was good. That means that it's for you, it is
for your flourishing, and it's lovely that when I failed
to show truth's goodness and address really the person and
the way in which this truth actually holds for you
(47:26):
something that is essential to you and something that will
benefit you, that I was failing to really give them
the truth and its fullness. The truth is only fully
itself when it's fired from the inside with charity. So
charity and truth go together. The Holy Spirit is the
spirit of truth, and the spirit of love, and the
(47:48):
truth of God's creation that He's and planted throughout the
works of his hands. They are also filled with goodness.
They're for us. And so I think that that when
we when we present the truth in a way that
shows its goodness, we start to gain hearts because there
we start to pull on the on man's desire for
(48:11):
the good which is written into the depths of us.
And so we shouldn't I don't think despair of this
dialogue about truth. I think maybe we just need to
continue to work on presenting truth in a way that
reveals its profundity. There's there's a convicting power to it.
(48:33):
I am. I was once invited. This is an odd thing.
So I was once invited to give a talk at
a conference on human sexuality, and it was from a
very liberal perspective, And so these were people that were
engaging in all sorts of structures of intimate relationships that
(48:54):
are kind of scandalous or uh, definitely not common, especially
in a Christian context, right, So like polyamorous relationships where
you have multiple lovers and you all have a pact
and etc. So they invited me to come and give
a talk on chastity. So this is kind of an
(49:15):
amazing thing. So I went to some of their talks
and I listened to them, and what I realized is
that there was a complete forgetfulness of a creator and
of a reality that preceded them, and that these were
people that were trying to find a way forward to
build a life of love and of intimate relationships. They
(49:36):
wanted ethical relationships, so that's why they were requiring consent
among all of these partners. There was also a kind
of despair present and the reasons why they were doing
that because they had been hurt by previous attempts at
marriage and they kind of gave up on it and
thought they weren't good enough for it or they weren't
capable of it, and so they were trying to find
(49:56):
a way forward. So when I gave my presentation, I
went all the way back to the beginning too. Why
is there something instead of nothing? And where did all
of this come from? And what what can we say
about this? And we have to make a decision, Like
rat Singer says in his Introduction to Christianity, what is
(50:17):
our first What is our first principle? Is it logos?
Or is it chaos? Is it at the beginning of everything?
Is their mind or is mind an accidental product of
what is otherwise a meaningless and chaotic process? You have
to make a choice right about and make a stand
(50:37):
on that position, because it's a it's an a priori
philosophical position that you're going to take about life. So
why take the one where God exists? And what does
that mean? And what does that mean about the body?
And what does that mean about sexual love? And and
so I presented for them this vision that John Paul
the Second gives us of theology of the body and
(51:00):
the great meaningfulness of the body, and of human love,
it's power to be an icon of the divine love
within history, etc. They were blown away. I don't know
if any of them afterwards had conversions, but they came
up to me and they said, I had no idea
that that was the Christian understanding of sexuality. It is
(51:20):
so beautiful. It is just so beautiful. And my prayer
for them is simply that at some point that there
would be a break in of God's light and love
for them, that they would realize that that vision of
beauty is something that they can take a stand on
and that they can participate in that they don't have
(51:40):
to live in this other path, which is ultimately very
despairing and carries with it a lot of sorrow and suffering.
I often like to tell people life is hard. It's
going to be hard no matter what you do. But
the hard things of life are so different. Lived within
a profect relationship with your creator and with the conviction
(52:03):
of the goodness and the truth of the life that
you are living, it's a completely different experience. It's a
lifting of a heavy burden. Christ yoke is gentle and
and and can be born because it's born within something
much greater than yourself. And everyone is longing to participate
in something that is greater than themselves, something that's meaningful,
(52:27):
that's solid, that's that's exquisitely beautiful, that is inspiring, that's
in the heart of every human being. So we got
to show them that that's what truth is about. It's
not simply that I have I have something and you've
got to obey it whether you like it or not.
It's like, no, let me show you what you're invited
to and that it's for you. It's not against you,
(52:50):
but it's for you. Is it hard, Yes, it's hard,
but it's life giving, and it's it's beautiful and it
and in the end it core response to the most
profound desires that you have in a way that you're
not going to find anywhere else. So see, come and see. Yes,
(53:12):
let me introduce you to someone. Yeah, come and see.
Speaker 5 (53:19):
So you're really not talking about it necessarily a philosophical
approach to these things. It's more of a I guess,
an effective approach of getting It's not strict philosophy or
you're actually present producing an argumentation. You're saying you're offering.
You're offering an alternative to them and trying to show
them the beauty of that alternative and to maybe excite
(53:42):
their wonder.
Speaker 4 (53:43):
Yeah, for the pursuing I mean philosophy certainly has a
place within that, because that's our love of wisdom and
our our human minds are thirsty and desirous of truth.
So I mean that's part of the beauty of Catholicism.
It's not it's not fidiism. It isn't simply a proclamation
(54:04):
of a faith that goes beyond your capacity to understand.
It is that, And if it weren't that, it wouldn't
be as satisfying as it is because it's introducing this
into this mystery that is just mind blowingly unbelievably beautiful,
and you're challenge to take it up as true and
to live out of it and watch it transform you. Right,
not it, but Him, this lived relationship with the creator
(54:29):
and the redeemer of your existence. But philosophy definitely has
a place in it, and I think there's an essential
contribution for those who discover philosophical truths and can present
them in a way that is compelling. So one of
my favorite podcasters is Jordan Peterson. I know he's a
controversial figure for many, but he's someone who had the
(54:54):
courage to say what he was seeing as harmful about
some things in our culture and what was happening around
him at great cost to himself with conviction and out
of really a charity because what he's seeing is harm
coming to people that he cares about. He's not a mean,
(55:17):
selfish person. He's someone who is discovering things about the
world in reality, and it's led him into a dialogue
with Christianity in a way. He's discovering the Western tradition,
both its philosophy and its theology, and how it sheds
light upon the world around him, and it's fresh and
it's interesting. He's a psychologist, so he's coming from a
(55:40):
psychological perspective, and in some ways he reminds me of
Guardini on that because he's discovering things, and he's analyzing scripture,
and he's analyzing psychological trends, he's analyzing politics. He's analyzing
these things not from a fidistic perspective or as an
(56:00):
evangelist who's out to convince you to be a Christian.
That's not his perspective. He's simply showing you what he's
discovering and how it's for you, how it's for your
good and for the good of society to discover these things.
So that is I think an essential contribution for philosophy
to make.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
Yeah, anyway, Christie, we're past the end of the hour.
Speaker 5 (56:26):
You can know.
Speaker 3 (56:28):
Are you good for another five minutes?
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (56:30):
Sure, sure, I'm good for it. I love talking, so
you can get me to just get me going. I'll
just keep going.
Speaker 3 (56:38):
And I think of ways of presenting philosophy. My way
is to put together a lot of footnotes.
Speaker 4 (56:54):
What you need is really a lot of footnotes, a
lot of footnotes. Yeah, the history of it? Yeah, yeah,
you need.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
But from that, the last question that I'd like you
to address is what might Guardini say here we are
today today about AI? Oh?
Speaker 4 (57:19):
Yeah, it's terrifying, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (57:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (57:23):
I saw that question. I'm like, oh, that's a hard one.
What would Gardini say about AI? You know, at the
end of his life looking at what was before him?
And in some ways AI is just another exponential growth
on the technocratic and technological advances that we've already seen.
It just bumps it up to another degree. But I
(57:46):
think it's similar in many ways of a technology that
escapes our grasp. In many ways, this is an amazing
capacity that we have as human beings to create something
that well quite honestly could enslave us and escape our
our power of control and our ability to handle responsibly.
(58:11):
In all of this, what really comes to me is
Guardini's contribution to the importance of truth, and along with it,
his hope at the end of his life that the
real place of transformation of the world, the real pivotal
place of where the culture, where culture is created and
(58:31):
shaped and guided, is the conscience of man. So the
place in which all of us stand before God alone,
responsible for ourselves and responsible for our lives, with a
responsibility toward truth, a responsibility toward goodness. And he turned
really his attention at the end of his career toward
(58:51):
cultivating those conditions in which man's conscience could be.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Formed and.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
Be healthy. So the need for prayer a place, the
need for silence, the need for contact with God. So
I would say, like in regard to AI, those two
things I think are really important. First of all, that
(59:22):
whenever we develop a technology, we need a corresponding growth
in our interior responsibility for it and our acknowledgment of
that responsibility. And this is tricky because I'm responsible for
things that you aren't and vice versa, and you can't
be responsible on my behalf. This is something where the
buck stops at every person. Right, every person contributes to
(59:45):
the improvement or the decline of our world by their
personal stands before God and the way that they live
their lives. So that's that interior freedom, or that interior
need for the formation of conscience so that we can
exercise our freedom responsibly. The other part of that is
the conviction of the importance of truth. So AI gives
(01:00:09):
us the ability to lie in ways that are absolutely
profoundly destructive. And if there was something that needed to
be examined, I would think that it's and regulated, it
would be the way in which AI lies. Now, there
is such a thing as art and the fabrication of
(01:00:30):
creativity and the fabrication of artificial things. But where you
create a world of deep fakes and an inability to
distinguish between fact and fiction, between truth and reality, you
are destroying your society. I listened to someone, and I
forget the name of this person. They were suggesting that
(01:00:51):
they're involved in the process of this creation of AI,
and they were suggesting that it needs to be made
illegal to create artificial persons, that that needs to become
a punishable offense, so creating bots, for example, that influence
(01:01:12):
social media and opinion polls, etc. That the creation of
fake persons and of false of deep fakes, and of
false images needs to be punished and needs to be
regulated in a very strict sense. And I think that
that makes a lot of sense. That we really need
as a society to be convicted about the importance of truth.
(01:01:32):
We've come to a real crisis on this and the
challenges that we faith in dialoguing and pursuing truth. Understanding
it cannot be an excuse for allowing us to continue
on this path. We're on a path of self destruction.
We must recover the importance of truth and begin explaining that,
showing that, and standing by it at all levels of
(01:01:56):
our society. So I think hopefully Guardian would agree with
me on that one. I think you would, and I'll
just you know, buy that and throw out Guardini's book
on the Virtues. I encourage everyone to buy it. It's
available in English, and he has a chapter there on
truthfulness and how it's the foundation of society. And I
(01:02:17):
think his book on the Virtues would be a wonderful
thing for people to read and allow the patrimony, the
legacy of Guardini to bear fruit in our American culture today.
So thank you, Yeah, you're welcome, thank you, thank you
for inviting me on you.
Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
Well, we just might have some final words from Christopher though.
Speaker 5 (01:02:39):
All right, oh, I don't know about that. I don't
think everything else to say, except I was going to
point out that I had a similar experience with you
many years ago, back in the nineties. I think it was.
I was on a panel discussion with in West Hollywood,
very seemingly hostilely as a Catholic hostelin environment, and one
(01:03:02):
of the panelists was producer Hollywood producer full of all
Hollywood types, and the other one was the chief ecumenical
officer I think was the Universal Church of God again
lesbian church. So at one point she challenged she I
was asked about basically my approach to truth, and I said,
(01:03:23):
I expressed I did believe that there was true there's
some things where you're truly false, are truly or truly true,
And so she launched often to this thing about the
idea that your true, you're I'm right, and you're wrong
has led to all sorts of persecution and evil throughout
the world. So she was lowly everybody to sleep at
(01:03:46):
that point. So I just said to her, I said, well,
but if I disagree with that, Richard hath said, when
you have to say that I was wrong? And she said,
let's ask the audience. Well, the most amazing thing was
that these people had never heard the con such a
truth like that, they had never heard the principal non contradiction.
They were absolutely excited over it. I was. I was
mobbed at the end of the meeting by people asking
(01:04:09):
me questions about this. So there is a I think
there is a there's a kind of basic common sense.
It still exists even in Hollywood. If you can find
it in Hollywood, you probably find almost any place, maybe
even rural Ohio. And so I think you're right about that.
It's just that somebody didn't get into this, end of
(01:04:29):
the day, the whole question of culture, right when when
you have a deep skepticism in infecting the culture, you're
actually it's very difficult to work against that. And so
even if you make some advances, I often feel like
you're being pushed back at the same time. So it's
just random.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Yeah, Well, I also think it's good to have a
plan B which is why we here on the open
door taking names. What do we run into people who
disagree with us? In case the dialogue doesn't ultimately work out,
(01:05:17):
we are taking names with plan B. Well, you don't
want to hear plans, So let's return, as we always do,
to the source of things, God's word, and the gospel
for today is from Matthew. At that time, Jesus withdrew
(01:05:39):
to the region of tire Insidon, and behold, a Canaanite
woman of that district came and called out, have pity
on me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is tormented
by a demon. But he did not say a word
in answer to her. His disciples came and asked him
send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.
(01:06:02):
He said in reply, I was sent only to the
lost sheep of the House of Israel. But the woman
came and did him homage, saying, Lord, help me. He
said in reply, it is not right to take the
food of the children and throw it to the dogs.
(01:06:24):
She said, please Lord, for even the dogs eat the
scraps that fall from the table of their masters. Then
Jesus said to her in reply, a woman, great is
your faith, let it be done for you as you wish,
and her daughter was healed from that hour. Come Lord Jesus, come,
(01:06:51):
Thank you so much, Christine, thank you, thank you, yeah,
thank you. Fine, all right, that was great, really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (01:07:09):
Well, thanks for having me on. And always a pleasure
to meet a friend of Monsignor Gallus. So I'm glad
you all are doing this podcast out in California, of
all places, so the lions Den, Chris.
Speaker 3 (01:07:24):
Christopher used to live here.
Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
Where are you now, Christopher? Oh, Central Ohio? Okay? I
did my masks at Franciscan.
Speaker 5 (01:07:35):
Okay, yeah, but that's about it's about two and a
half hours from we live. We lived in almost in
the center of the state, a very significant town here
in Ohio, population four hundred.
Speaker 4 (01:07:49):
Oh wow.
Speaker 5 (01:07:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
He carries the flag for the American Solidarity Party. Oh wow.
Speaker 4 (01:07:56):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (01:07:57):
I'm a village Johnson, so that's that's small flag. But
he keeps systems, you know, most not many high political
philosophical discussions and the village of Hartford village council. It's
mostly about the sewer.
Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
You got the territory, all right, You got to take.
Speaker 4 (01:08:22):
Care of those necessities to get to that other I know.
Speaker 5 (01:08:25):
Most of local governments about moving one water from one
place to another. Yeah, think of the agent romans. That
was their focus. All right, God speak to you all.
Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
Thank you, God.
Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Bless Hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabel Mosley, author, professor of
theology and host of them Sings My Soul and Destination
Sainthood on w c A T Radio. I invite you
to listen in and find inspiration along this sacred journey.
We're traveling together to make our lives a masterpiece and
(01:08:59):
with God's grace, become saints. Join me Annabel Moseley for
then sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio.
God bless you. Remember you are never alone. God is
always with you.
Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
Thank you for listening to a production of WCAT Radio.
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget Love lifts up when knowledge takes flight.
You're listening to WCAT radio. You're home for authentic Catholic programming.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Please join us at the Open Door. We discuss solidarity, subsidiarity,
economic democracy, in non violence in light of Catholic social teaching.
We explore how to move from discussion to political change.
Culture and politics, to be sure, are interwoven, so we
care deeply about education and the arts. Our questions often
(00:29):
lead us to report on the projects and promise of
the American Solidarity Party.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to the Open Door. Jim Hannick here with fellow
panelists Christopher Zender Tristemente the list that Amiga Valerie Niemeier
as a back to school conflict and claiming that she
lacks the power of bylocation, we can only say that
(00:59):
we will miss her now. Today we are going to
explore the thought of Servant of God Romano Gardini, a
widely influential theologian whom both Pope Benedict the sixteenth and
Pope Francis deeply admired. B. T. W. Soded Flannery O'Connor.
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Guardini is often thought of as a unifying figure in
the church. Our welcome guest is Christine Myers Miller. She
is a graduate of the Pontifical John Paul Two Institute
for Studies in Marriage and Family in Washington, d C.
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And is the director of Adult Faith, Formation, Marriage and
Family Life at Saint Bernard of Clairvaux Parish in Tulsa.
Meyers Miller research Roma Gardini in Depth for her doctoral
thesis studying the topic of Christian responsibility for the world.
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She has published essays in the Catechetical Review, Humanum Online Review,
and in the important theological journal Communio. Let's begin, as
we always do in prayer. Come, Holy Spirit, Fill the
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hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire
of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they shall
be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray, Oh God, who have taught the hearts
of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit,
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grant that in the same spirit we may be true,
wise and ever rejoice in His consolation through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
To get us started, Christine, could you tell us a
bit about yourself and have you always been in Oakie?
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Well, I do come from Okie Stock So my family
has been in Oklahoma for I don't know, maybe about
one hundred years, and my dad worked in oil, so
we moved around a bit when I was growing up,
but the family settled back in Oklahoma again in the
nineties and I finished growing up here to middle school
and high school in Oklahoma and love Oklahoma. So it's
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really a great place. So I know sometimes the middle
of the country gets called the flyover zone, but I
wouldn't live anywhere else, So I'm happy to fly to
the coast and visit, but I'm very happy to live
in Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
So your view is better sooner than later.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Well, I didn't attend school in Oklahoma, so I'm not
a part of the great competition between Oklahoma State and
the University of Oklahoma. But that is that's a popular
rivalry around here. So we take our sports pretty seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah. Well, all right, so Christopher, our guest has kindly
introduced herself. Do you want to carry us forward?
Speaker 5 (04:31):
Now let's begin. One thing she didn't mentioned is she
studied at the John pull the Second Institute. Maybe she
could describe for us what that was like and the
institution how it reflects the thought of John the Second.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Yeah, I'd love to. So this is a wonderful place
to study. It's really a gym in the life of
the church. Theologically, they have a very balanced approach, so
they're steeped in the tradition but open to the new
contributions in philosophy and theology that were brought by the
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Pontificate of John Paul the Second, and right now in
the church that doesn't describe every theological institute. So their
fidelity and then also their receptivity to the Pontificate of
John Paul two, I think is very important for the
Church as a whole and for the Church here in
the United States. So they're focused very much on receiving
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John Paul the Second's insight, which is tied deeply to
the Second Vatican Council, that you can really only understand
the human person in terms of love, that human beings
were created from love and for love. That Christ has
revealed to us the reality of God, a triune God,
one substantially but a communion of persons, and whose life
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is love, and that really love has everything to do
with truth, and truth has everything to do with love.
These two things go together, and they provide the foundation
for a very rich anthropology that touches not only on
human sexuality, the body, gender, issues marriage and family life,
but really work, economy, the nature of our being embodied
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in the world. And it's a wonderful place to study,
so very it's very challenging. They drive drive their students
pretty hard to go deep in philosophy and theology, but
it's a very rewarding place to study. So I'm grateful
for my time there. I would say that I went
there already very much convicted of my Catholic faith and
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my desire to be a disciple of Christ and to
follow him wherever he led me. But the John Pelto
Institute helped me understand the world. It helped me understand
kind of the shape of our modern world, how it
related to the ancient and medieval world, Christendom, and the
Christian faith, and really brought a kind of healing to
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me because I went there realizing that there was a
disconnect between the faith that I was pursuing and living
and the world that I was living in, and it
was hard for me to reconcile them. There were things
about the Catholic faith that I couldn't I couldn't understand,
I couldn't incorporate into a whole vision or a synthesis
of how I understood reality, and my studies at the
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Jompole Institute helped me kind of diagnose that and grow
in an understanding which deepened my convictions, my faith convictions,
and gave my mind a place to rest. So I'm
grateful for that. It was beautiful. I hope many students
will go there. So maybe someone listening to this podcast
will catch the bug and go to the John Paul
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Too Institute. That would please me very much.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
You talking about so it sounds like what you're saying
before you went there. You see, your mind was formed
by what it seemed to be reality, at least the
modern modern reality. What sort of things? What was the
boned contention between what you were thinking and what the
Catholic Church was teaching.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, I think you know, I was public school educated.
I was not Catholic school educated, so public schools K
through twelve, and then I attended Vanderbilt for my undergraduate
and did secondary education in English as my major. I
love literature and already had a sense of like the
ascetic and beauty and symbolism that drew me very much.
(08:32):
But I just I think imbibed a lot of relativism
also a kind of skepticism about our ability to know
reality or know the truth.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
This.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
I remember sitting in middle school science class and learning
that the desk in front of you isn't a desk.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It is.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
A conglomerate of molecules and pieces and parts. It has
no wholeness of itself. It's spackled, you know, material meaningless
material that's spackled together. And now you call it a desk.
And I think, because of the kind of intellect that
I have, I absorb that very deeply as a way
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to understand the world, how to understand reality. That you know,
that's very much a Cartesian view of the material world,
that it's all random pieces that are have been grouped
together to form something. It's very different from a classical
understanding of form and that things have natures and their
intelligible et cetera. So I loved Aristotle. When I read
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Aristotle at the JP two Institute, it was like he
gave me the world back because he said, you know,
if you want to know the world, open your eyes
and observe it. It speaks, it's intelligible, it tells you
about itself. You don't have to doubt your ability to
come to a common sense knowledge of what things are.
Everything doesn't have to be held in doubt, deconstructed and
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reconstructed based on on experimentation or something. So that for
me was very liberating to realize that there was so
many things that I could know by a careful, attentive, humble,
obedient observation of reality. I think that I had been
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taught to be skeptical of everything, and that's that leads
you to nihilism and to a place of really profound
self doubt as well, because you don't know how to
grasp the truth, and we have a great need of
truth as human beings. So I'm not sure if I
answered your question.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
But well what I want to know right off is
in that whole process, where are you left with the
unpaid bills on your desk?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Well, God has been very good to me, so I
managed to go through all of this, you know, education,
with coming free of debt. So that's a great thing.
And I've been liberated then to be able to serve
the church. So the unpaid bills on my desk are
paid by Saint Bernard of Clervaux Parish, and here I
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have a beautiful assignment to bring the Catholic faith to
adults and to support marriage and family life in our parish.
So that's my task, and that's how I earn my
bread and butter.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Could you give us some particulars on your position. What
does it involve?
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Yeah, Well, it's sort of a dream position in many
ways because I have an enormous freedom to provide programming
for adults, and so I have the joy of being
able to prayerfully discern where I believe God is asking us,
to study what He's wanting us to do, and then
to draw together classes. So I usually provide a couple
of classes throughout the year at different times of day,
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morning and evening to reach people who are retire They
can come during the day very easily, and prefer that
also people who are still working, they'll come in the evenings.
We provide childcare for evening programming for parents so that
they can be hands free and their children are entrusted
to competent, loving adults, and they then are free to
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apply their minds and their hearts to what's set before them.
So it's exciting. Our diocese actually just went to restored order.
Our bishop announced that here in the preceding months that
we're returning to a restored order of the sacrament. So
that means that by twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine,
I forget what the goal is, our children will receive
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confirmation and for so holy communion in third grade. This
puts a lot of pressure on us to give really
quality formation and also to form our parents, because obviously
there's no carot to entice them to bring their children
for a later confirmation or a stick to beat them with,
so we have to actually provide them with something that
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they find meaningful. So it's a welcome challenge because the
faith of parents is essential to the handing on of
the faith to children. They have a contribution that nobody
can make but them, and so we want to equip
them to do that with conviction and joy. So that's
the task that's laid before me and my coworkers here,
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so we're happy to take it up with God's help.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Now you mentioned freedom, has the absence of monsign Pat
Gallous anster freedom or not? Or is he's still looking
in the background. You might remember, audience that Monsignor Gallus
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was a recent guest of ours, and he's removed himself
to a monkery, I mean a monastery.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Monsignor Gallus is a wonderful man, very deeply loved here
at Saint Bernard's and in the Diocese of Tulsa and
Eastern Oklahoma more broadly so and very much by me.
He's been a spiritual father to me. So he hired
me here in twenty fifteen and has been a spiritual
director and guide and friend and father to me for
all these years. So whenever he asks me to do
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something that I'm always ready to follow. So I was
very happy that you are a longtime friend of his,
and so grateful to be invited to be a part
of your podcast through him.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
I don't know, just a brief side here and a
side bar. He has recently upended Chesterton research.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Oh no, oh, that's great.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Actually unpublished poem. An unpublished poem, Fragment. Fragment was analyzed
carefully in a recent issue of Guililbert, and it turned
out the analysis was not quite up to snuff, and
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so one senior wrote a letter to the editor Dale Alquist,
pointing out that there would be a better way to
decipher the handwriting that Dale himself had tried to decipher
to reconstitute this poem. So he's a literary expert as well.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Yes, so that's a great contribution that he's making to
chesterton research. And he he is witty and intelligent like Chesterton.
I'm sure that there's a supernatural friendship there between the
two of them. So that's a delight. I think he
mentioned to me that he made that discovery, so congratulations.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah, they were both of them, well senior still, but
they were both of them Chesterton and in an early fashion,
committed to the Predican.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Diet, the Predican diet. What is this?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
No, Chesterton was not committed to the predicate diet. He
was a beard vacant man from beginning to end. Christopher,
could you get us back on track please?
Speaker 5 (16:21):
We should probably start talking about Romano Gardini. Oh maybe
could you know somebody? Uh, people might not I have
actually ever read Romano Garny, So so an introduction is fine.
I mean, especially explain to people why and Italians writing
in German?
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, so he Romanic Guardini is just he's a great
figure of the recent of recent history, and often figures
of recent history are the most forgotten. So but there
has been a little bit of a revival of interest
in Guardini, and a lot of his works aren't translated
into English. So I had the joy in my doctoral
studies of discovering a lot of his untranslated works and
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reading them in the original And I'd love to see
more of them translated at some point so that we
can benefit from his work. But he was born in
eighteen eighty five in Verona, Italy, to an Italian family. Obviously,
he's the oldest of four boys. His father was a merchant,
so he did trade work. He was also involved in
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diplomacy for the Italian government. When Guardini was just a
year old, they moved to Maitz, Germany, and Guardini grew
up there. Of all of the Guardini siblings, he was
the only one that really felt German, so he was
formed so deeply by the culture of the people the
intellectual climate there that he stayed. He took German citizenship.
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He was studied at Tubingen as a youth, experienced a
very profound conversion in that time, and along with a
childhood friend, entered seminary and was ordained to the priesthood
in nineteen ten. During his habilitation studies at Bond, he
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wrote an article for Maria Locke Abbey, so the abbot
there Ildefond's herr Weger. He was part of the German
liturgical movement, a real inspirer of it, and invited Guardini
to write an article. He wrote Spirit of the Liturgy
nineteen eighteen. So this is probably his most famous work.
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And if you're familiar very much with the corpus of Ratzinger,
Cardinal Ratzinger Benedicta the sixteenth, you know that his work
on the liturgy borrows the title Spirit of the Liturgy.
He took that from Guardini with the hopes that his
work would in some way participate in the same sort
of renewal that Guardini's work in nineteen eighteen inspired. There
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was a lot of enthusiasm about improving the lay person's
ability to participate in this great act of the Church,
the worship, the Holy Liturgy of the Church. So that
springboarded him into kind of a position of fame in
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nineteen eighteen. He was a very young man at the time.
He also, about the same time was introduced to the
German youth movement quickborn, so Germany in between the wars
saw a lot of renewal of youth who really wanted
a different life for themselves. The First World War was
very traumatic to Germany. Germany was blamed for it. There
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was much poverty, there was a lot of kind of
low morale, and the young people of the time were
really searching for a way forward and a new identity
and something to latch onto, something to inspire them. Of course,
that created, unfortunately a fertile ground for national socialism and
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the Nazi movement, which started to gain control and influence
in the minds and hearts of people at that time.
But it was also a fertile ground for a renewal
of Catholic faith and life, and so Guardini was a
part of this youth movement. Quickborn was a leader of
it for many years. He was in Let's see what
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year was that? I took a few notes here. In
nineteen twenty three a position was created for him at
the University of Berlin. So the Prussian Minister of Culture
created a Catholic veltenshallong a chair for him that just
means worldview, and invited him to this professorship at the
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University of Berlin, where Guardini was enormously popular. So what
he did he studied dogmatics for his doctoral work. But
what he did as a professor is he took the
light of faith that he received from his conviction, his
Catholic convictions, and the purity with which he received the
teachings of the Church, and he allowed that light of
faith to shine upon earthly realities, realities of culture, maybe
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questions of the faith, but to examine them with a
kind of freshness. He had a phenomenological approach, which was
also the school of phenomenology was really taking off in
between the wars as well as well as personalism. The
dramas that Europe suffered in the twentieth century really gave
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birth to a renewed sense of the need to regain
contact with reality, which is what phenomenology was trying to do.
Regain contact with real things and come to know what
they were. And personalism really wanted to recover the dignity
of the human person, which had been denied and denigrated
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by these totalitarian regimes and fascism, which had crushed so
many and come to see the individual as something less
important than the whole in a way that was harmful
to man and caused great suffering. So Guardini was living
right in the of all of these movements, and his
lectures were enormously popular. He would be in large lecture halls,
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they'd be packed with students, Catholics, non Catholics. Berlin is
not a Catholic city. It was a Protestant city at
the time. Since then it's been very much influenced by
being behind the Soviet Bloc and communism. So this was
not a Catholic atmosphere in which he was living. But
his work was so interesting that it drew a wide
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variety of people. He taught them to seek the truth
was very important to Guardini. Is really the heart of
his life's work was to pursue truth, to know it profoundly,
and that truth in the light of faith, to combine
those together. It was very fascinating to many people. So
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he was shut down from that position in nineteen thirty nine.
So as the National Socialist regime took power, they pulled
him into the office and explained to him that when
the government has a worldview, there's no Catholic worldview taught
in the university. His name was put on a death
list by the Nazis. However, Guardini was so famous and
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also an international figure because he was Italian by birth,
and very obviously Italian in his look and also his name.
You couldn't escape that he was not a native German,
and these things put him sort of on a little
bit of protection from an immediate extermination by the Nazi regime.
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But nevertheless his positions were stripped from him. The German
youth movement as well was shut down in nineteen thirty nine.
They had to go and try to destroy documentation that
would cause them to be especially suspect by the Nazi Party,
and everything became a bit quiet. Guardini spent those war
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years really focusing on his intellectual work, and it was
very productive actually for him.
Speaker 5 (24:03):
So how would you were talking about being a phenomenologist,
how would you how would his procedure theologically and philosophically
differ from say Thomas Aquinas or maybe the Neotomas.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Well, I think he differs from. So Aquitas is a realist, right,
so he believes there's an objective reality and that knowledge
comes from a reception of an objective world. That is
a very different position than what we find as the
rise of modernity comes about. So the work of Descartes
casts doubt on our senses and what we can honestly
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know through common experience, and there's a desire to only
confirm and know what can be experimented upon and verified
by data. Phenomenology wants to recover that objective reality that
there there is a world before us, and that this
world presents itself, and that we are capable of experiencing
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it and growing and knowledge with it. So he differs
from Aquinas in the sense that Guardini was not very
interested in doing scholarly work, which would require a comparison
of thought among different scholars how they've interpreted things in
an analysis of that. Thomas Aquinas was an absolute master
and genius, and doing precisely that. He brought into dialogue
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the ancient philosophers Aristotle, in particular through at his time
the recent discovery rediscovery of the works of Aristotle through
Muslim philosophers. So Quinas was absorbing Aristotle via Muslim philosophers
and bringing them into dialogue with Christian theologians, the great
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Christian theologians of his time, and then commenting through his
own prayer and contemplation and discernment upon their contraybutiance. He's
absolute master at that. That's why he's the Angelic doctor
and is so important for the theological work of the time.
But Guardini what he wanted to do was regain contact,
(26:13):
like a fresh contact with reality, a fresh observation of it,
realizing that the contribution that he would give wouldn't necessarily
be of the caliber of a Thomas Aquinas or a
scholarly level, but it's a It does, though, have a
kind of freshness and newness to it that provides a
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kind of a renewed wonder and a renewed contact with
the world that we desperately need. If we become so
subjective that we think that we're creating the meaning of
the world, and Guardini helps correct that. It's like, no,
the world itself has something to say to you and
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is profound and beautiful and wondrous, and you needed to
get back into touch with what's outside of you and
allow that to enrich the inside of you. But but
you know, we're not the creators of the world. We
are inheritors, we are beneficiaries, we're recipients of this beautiful world.
So so that would be kind of a distinction. Both
(27:20):
kinds of thought have a contribution to make, I think,
to the life of the church and the life of
the mind. They're just they're distinct contributions though that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
Well, yeah, I guess because I wonder about is that
Thomas was, along with Aristotle, said all knowledge begins with experience.
So actually it's I mean, even though forms of sclass
and became corrupt and began to be too much rooted
in what the what the expert at the end of
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the past experts and said the past thinkers. Nevertheless, that's
actually the foundation of tumism. That's where you're talking to me,
a really a semi realist, you know, you the natures
of things are actually present in the things themselves, so
we can actually experience them, they come to know them.
So I guess I wonder they use the term phenomenology too,
(28:13):
seem to suggest the pot's phenomena, which is not reality
at all. That's just the perception of reality. So is
it would it be right to say that Guardini's approach
is more effective, effective with a and more more maybe
almost poetic in terms of trying to get people to
(28:35):
rediscover what had been lost in an earlier familier earlier tradition.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
I do think that it would be, uh, it would
be accurate to describe his approach as as poetic as
long as you maintain the depth of his work that
it's not simply so, it's not romanticism, and it's not subjectivism.
So he comes to an approach to the world that
(29:03):
is still informed by the richness of the Catholic tradition
in the Western tradition is still behind him and inside
of his vision. There's not an opposition there between Guardini
or his version of phenomenology and Tomism, for example, and
the approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas. So his real gift
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was to allow the light of faith to shine upon
earthly realities, and in that new things come into vision
that perhaps you wouldn't have seen otherwise about the human
person or about a work of literature. So I don't
know if that helps, but it's not simply a His
(29:48):
pursuit wasn't for say, beauty or emotion or but he
really wanted truth. So it's not simply to capture an
experience of aarticular emotion, et cetera, but to really get
to the heart of things. So, and to do so
in a way that is I think poetic would be
(30:09):
accurate in for some of his work.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, I have a I guess a follow up question
on method, But then I want to go ahead. You'd
mentioned theological anthropology earlier, and I want to go ahead
to that, But first the follow up question. You might
(30:36):
say that as a phenomenologist, Guardini calls us to a
fresh vision of how things are in themselves. It's a
(30:57):
vision that frames our experience in a new way. We
see deeper. Now, might someone in a deflationary mood perish
the thought? But it's early here in Los Angeles. Might
(31:21):
someone in a deflationary mood say yes, but that's all descriptive.
And suppose someone says to me, I don't see things
the way you see things, And I'm all for seeing things,
but I don't see things the way you see things.
(31:44):
How do we ever move forward from a discourse that
is descriptive to the drawing of conclusions or the resolution
shouldn't have ant enemies?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
Yeah, and I think that that is the great challenge
that we have now, especially with the kind of subjective
emphasis that we have in our culture, especially with freedom
in the individual vision, the desire to create my life
according to how I want it to be. There's an orientation,
(32:25):
like in our culture toward reality that's very much intent
upon shaping and upon directing it according to my will.
So if you will a kind of freedom that is
unhinged from a reception of truth. So when that is
first and foremost, then the dialogue and the pursuit of
(32:47):
truth becomes very difficult. So there is a sort of
personal asceticism that has to be in place for the
pursuit of truth, in which you allow truth to shape you,
and you humbly place yourself beneath the search for reality
and what it is, and you subject yourself to it.
(33:07):
That doesn't fully solve all of the problem of it,
of course, but it's absolutely essential. This is where, like
often the idea of pursuing truth in our culture today
sounds proud. Remember that I presented an article by Guardini
to a group of people here in Tulsa who are
(33:28):
involved in the community as leaders in the community, religious
and community leaders of other types, and this article about
truthfulness was seen as very proud. But actually it's the
opposite of that, because when you hold to the fact
that there's an objective reality that we are both trying
to understand, then we must humble ourselves before it, and
(33:52):
I must allow myself to be changed by what I see,
and I have to take my inter lockrator seriously and
really address their concerns and what their vision is. That
that's sort of the Sina Kwannon. There's no dialogue without
that kind of personal attitude toward the truth, and in
(34:13):
a culture that we have now, that's sort of a
rare attitude, and I think that's part of our trouble
in pursuing the dialogue, is that if you're not willing
to let your vision be altered, then it's hard to
enter into a conversation with someone and find unity. Barnini
does talk about this and some of his later works
(34:36):
about the challenge that we face in pursuing truth because
he's very influenced by a Plato on this. But there's
an abundance of truth, and that means that there are
multiple perspectives that you can have on something, and sometimes
coming to a unity or to a decision, a decisive
point about a particular topic is difficult. But he would
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say we must guard ourselves from a kind of skepticism
that would, because of this abundance of what we're looking
at together and the difficulty of the task, that we
would simply put it aside. We nevertheless must pursue it.
It's absolutely essential to the work of a university, for example,
or to a society, that we would conform ourselves to
(35:21):
what is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Perhaps, and every analogy limps. Perhaps we could speak of
the esthetic reception of a work of art. Vision is
(35:45):
certainly involved, and we find ourselves seeing things back to
the things in very different ways. But we have to
stand before the thing. If you take one view of
Caravaggio and I take another, well, let's make sure that
(36:08):
we're viewing the actual work and keep returning to the
actual work. So perhaps that would be a way to
ground dialogue. And I think of a famous line from
John Paul two, let's call things by their proper names.
(36:34):
We have to be before them. But that's a digression
on a digression. Now you mentioned theological anthropology, and as
I understand your way of thinking about that and Guardini's
before you can wrestle with the great moral issues of
(36:57):
the day, and they're all as great moral issues of
the day, and sometimes they're just avoided and not wrestled with.
And I think of slavery as an example of one.
You have to have an understanding of who the human
person is and today, we have very different views of
(37:22):
what it is to be a human being. I mean
back to your desk, right, well say it with being
a human being. So how do you move from questions
about what it is to be a human being to
questions about how to live as a human being.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
Well, you know, there was a comment that Guardini made
towards the end of his career. So after World War
Two he was reinstated in the university so First and
Tubingen as a Catholic Weltenschaung professor. He was given his
chair back, the same idea of chair. Then a few
years later he was wooed by Munich and brought back
(38:09):
to Munich and he continued in his professorship through the
early nineteen sixties. And so he saw he saw the
changes that were occurring in society and the you know,
the post World War two era. And and part of
what he noted was when when confusion reims, we must
(38:30):
return to the simplest things and the most basic realities,
and we must look at them carefully. And so just
exactly to your point about if you're going to discuss
a work of art, place the work of art directly
before you. If you're going to look at the human person,
place the human person before you and look at the
(38:52):
different aspects of human life, and the different sciences have
different contributions to make to this. An apology in this vision,
I would say, with one caveat, is that the scientific
enterprise can't be subjected to ulterior motives. And I'm afraid
that we're seeing that very often in society right now,
(39:13):
that if you're scientists, and the natural sciences or the
soft sciences, the social sciences are allowing themselves to be
shaped by ulterior motives career careerism, or monetary gain or
(39:35):
bribes or self promotion, and it's falsifying their work such
that they're publishing articles that are not honest and not truthful.
Here we have a complete breakdown of knowledge. And when
you're in that situation, then what you do is you
create so much confusion that no one even knows where
(39:56):
to find reliable information. And the pursuit then of man's
good becomes merely impossible when each person in their proper
domain does not to have integrity in what they're doing
and pursue honestly the truth before them, to know the
truth and to really express it as clearly and as
(40:19):
accurately as they can when that does happen, though it doesn't,
there are contributions that come from all sides. So I
can give an example, and I wish I knew the
woman's name. I didn't prepare this because I had no
idea that we would like you wander off into these waters.
But there was a woman who did research on the
(40:39):
development of infants and small children. And she was not
by any means a conservative person or a Christian believer,
or she was a scientist, and she had secular views
that are very common in our times. But what she
observed was the need of a young child for its mother.
That children have underdeveloped undeveloped nervous systems, and the regulation
(41:04):
of their emotions comes through contact with their mother. Their
mother is actually the one that regulates the emotional response
of a child all the way through about age three.
And the implications of that, of course for working moms,
is very clear. Her research was therefore rejected because it
doesn't fit with the desire of a particular form of culture,
(41:28):
a particular understanding of woman in her place in the world.
And she had a terrible time publishing this work and
maintaining her academic career because it didn't fit with an ideology.
That's a problem. When we can't be honest about what's
before us and speak truthfully about our findings and really
(41:48):
observe them honestly and describe them accurately, then we cannot
pursue our authentic good and that causes a complete breakdown
in our society. And so I give that as an example,
because this isn't This is a beautiful thing I think
about the Catholic faith. It's part of what captured my
heart and my mind as a young person. The Church
(42:13):
maintains that the truths, the natural truths of this world,
are not in conflict with the truths of faith, and
they must all be pursued honestly. At times there may
be difficult reconciling them to one another, understanding how they
fit together, but we hold in principle that there is
no contradiction there. It also means that persons who do
(42:33):
not share are supernatural beliefs that are beyond the scope
of reason still have a place at the table and
conversation about understanding the human person and building a society.
So what's most essential is that inner integrity the pursuit
of truth and authentic good, which is an ethical principle
(42:55):
that is accessible to reason. That is a hallmark of
ancient philosophy, the pre Christian philosophy that's not inspired by
divine revelation and is not an offshoot of Christianity per se,
but has found a home within the Catholic tradition. So
that's enormously important, and that's I think a contribution that
(43:16):
the Catholic faith makes to the world that is extraordinarily
valuable on every level, politically, scientifically, whatever it does that
you're doing to be honest, be truthful, pursue the.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Good, right and truth remains the pivot.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Yes, and it requires humility and obedience. It requires well,
it requires a conviction that the truth is worth pursuing
and that you have an obligation to it. So it's
very refreshing whenever you discover the work of a scientist
(43:57):
or or a thinker who is convicted of that and
stands by it, their work brings light and is helpful
to us.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
Yeah. M Christopher, it's interesting. We talk about truth and
you're asking people to respond to truth. But even in
the roots of empirical science, if you go back to
like Bacon, his his adage that truth is power. Right,
(44:30):
knowledge is power. When you talk about people who refuse
to listen to the results a certain experimentation because it
it goes against their own interests or against their own ideas,
I think what you're looking at is a is a
what you might call a postmodern view of what truth.
(44:52):
The truth is only what truth is it is a
grasp of power. So the this is simple we're talking
about is deeply rooted in the corruption of philosophical thought
in the West, since you know, the seventeenth century. How
do we when you when you're dealing with that kind
(45:12):
of thing where every truth claim is merely considered to
be a power claim. And I can therefore, you know,
silence somebody who had says something I disagree with or
is not in my interest to hold simply because of
that reality. How is there any is there any kind
of dialogue that could be had with that kind of society.
Speaker 4 (45:36):
Well, I'm afraid that that's a dialogue that often ends
in the blood of martyrs. So where where there is
no reception to uh to the truth proclaimed, then it
can come to blows. Of course, might makes right in
the end, right, which is the kind of society that
that we're living in right now. I would say, though,
(45:56):
that we have to be careful to not despair of
the power of truth's beauty. And when it is presented well,
it has it has a power to convict. So, you know,
I at the John Paltoon Institute became very familiar with
the work of Hans Er Schwan Balthazar, which I have
(46:20):
some misgivings about in some ways, but I will say
this about about his work is that he helps restore
an understanding of the importance of the transcendental attributes of being,
that the world, that everything that exists shares and shares,
and being shares in those transcend transcendental attributes of truth, goodness, want, unity,
and beauty. From my own experience, what I came to
(46:43):
understand as a young person in you know, attempting dialogues
across lines of faith and conviction, was that when I
explained the truth to someone, but I failed to show
truth's goodness, I failed to bring forward how this truth
(47:06):
that I wanted to share I wanted to talk about
was good. That means that it's for you, it is
for your flourishing, and it's lovely that when I failed
to show truth's goodness and address really the person and
the way in which this truth actually holds for you
(47:26):
something that is essential to you and something that will
benefit you, that I was failing to really give them
the truth and its fullness. The truth is only fully
itself when it's fired from the inside with charity. So
charity and truth go together. The Holy Spirit is the
spirit of truth, and the spirit of love, and the
(47:48):
truth of God's creation that He's and planted throughout the
works of his hands. They are also filled with goodness.
They're for us. And so I think that that when
we when we present the truth in a way that
shows its goodness, we start to gain hearts because there
we start to pull on the on man's desire for
(48:11):
the good which is written into the depths of us.
And so we shouldn't I don't think despair of this
dialogue about truth. I think maybe we just need to
continue to work on presenting truth in a way that
reveals its profundity. There's there's a convicting power to it.
(48:33):
I am. I was once invited. This is an odd thing.
So I was once invited to give a talk at
a conference on human sexuality, and it was from a
very liberal perspective, And so these were people that were
engaging in all sorts of structures of intimate relationships that
(48:54):
are kind of scandalous or uh, definitely not common, especially
in a Christian context, right, So like polyamorous relationships where
you have multiple lovers and you all have a pact
and etc. So they invited me to come and give
a talk on chastity. So this is kind of an
(49:15):
amazing thing. So I went to some of their talks
and I listened to them, and what I realized is
that there was a complete forgetfulness of a creator and
of a reality that preceded them, and that these were
people that were trying to find a way forward to
build a life of love and of intimate relationships. They
(49:36):
wanted ethical relationships, so that's why they were requiring consent
among all of these partners. There was also a kind
of despair present and the reasons why they were doing
that because they had been hurt by previous attempts at
marriage and they kind of gave up on it and
thought they weren't good enough for it or they weren't
capable of it, and so they were trying to find
(49:56):
a way forward. So when I gave my presentation, I
went all the way back to the beginning too. Why
is there something instead of nothing? And where did all
of this come from? And what what can we say
about this? And we have to make a decision, Like
rat Singer says in his Introduction to Christianity, what is
(50:17):
our first What is our first principle? Is it logos?
Or is it chaos? Is it at the beginning of everything?
Is their mind or is mind an accidental product of
what is otherwise a meaningless and chaotic process? You have
to make a choice right about and make a stand
(50:37):
on that position, because it's a it's an a priori
philosophical position that you're going to take about life. So
why take the one where God exists? And what does
that mean? And what does that mean about the body?
And what does that mean about sexual love? And and
so I presented for them this vision that John Paul
the Second gives us of theology of the body and
(51:00):
the great meaningfulness of the body, and of human love,
it's power to be an icon of the divine love
within history, etc. They were blown away. I don't know
if any of them afterwards had conversions, but they came
up to me and they said, I had no idea
that that was the Christian understanding of sexuality. It is
(51:20):
so beautiful. It is just so beautiful. And my prayer
for them is simply that at some point that there
would be a break in of God's light and love
for them, that they would realize that that vision of
beauty is something that they can take a stand on
and that they can participate in that they don't have
(51:40):
to live in this other path, which is ultimately very
despairing and carries with it a lot of sorrow and suffering.
I often like to tell people life is hard. It's
going to be hard no matter what you do. But
the hard things of life are so different. Lived within
a profect relationship with your creator and with the conviction
(52:03):
of the goodness and the truth of the life that
you are living, it's a completely different experience. It's a
lifting of a heavy burden. Christ yoke is gentle and
and and can be born because it's born within something
much greater than yourself. And everyone is longing to participate
in something that is greater than themselves, something that's meaningful,
(52:27):
that's solid, that's that's exquisitely beautiful, that is inspiring, that's
in the heart of every human being. So we got
to show them that that's what truth is about. It's
not simply that I have I have something and you've
got to obey it whether you like it or not.
It's like, no, let me show you what you're invited
to and that it's for you. It's not against you,
(52:50):
but it's for you. Is it hard, Yes, it's hard,
but it's life giving, and it's it's beautiful and it
and in the end it core response to the most
profound desires that you have in a way that you're
not going to find anywhere else. So see, come and see. Yes,
(53:12):
let me introduce you to someone. Yeah, come and see.
Speaker 5 (53:19):
So you're really not talking about it necessarily a philosophical
approach to these things. It's more of a I guess,
an effective approach of getting It's not strict philosophy or
you're actually present producing an argumentation. You're saying you're offering.
You're offering an alternative to them and trying to show
them the beauty of that alternative and to maybe excite
(53:42):
their wonder.
Speaker 4 (53:43):
Yeah, for the pursuing I mean philosophy certainly has a
place within that, because that's our love of wisdom and
our our human minds are thirsty and desirous of truth.
So I mean that's part of the beauty of Catholicism.
It's not it's not fidiism. It isn't simply a proclamation
(54:04):
of a faith that goes beyond your capacity to understand.
It is that, And if it weren't that, it wouldn't
be as satisfying as it is because it's introducing this
into this mystery that is just mind blowingly unbelievably beautiful,
and you're challenge to take it up as true and
to live out of it and watch it transform you. Right,
not it, but Him, this lived relationship with the creator
(54:29):
and the redeemer of your existence. But philosophy definitely has
a place in it, and I think there's an essential
contribution for those who discover philosophical truths and can present
them in a way that is compelling. So one of
my favorite podcasters is Jordan Peterson. I know he's a
controversial figure for many, but he's someone who had the
(54:54):
courage to say what he was seeing as harmful about
some things in our culture and what was happening around
him at great cost to himself with conviction and out
of really a charity because what he's seeing is harm
coming to people that he cares about. He's not a mean,
(55:17):
selfish person. He's someone who is discovering things about the
world in reality, and it's led him into a dialogue
with Christianity in a way. He's discovering the Western tradition,
both its philosophy and its theology, and how it sheds
light upon the world around him, and it's fresh and
it's interesting. He's a psychologist, so he's coming from a
(55:40):
psychological perspective, and in some ways he reminds me of
Guardini on that because he's discovering things, and he's analyzing scripture,
and he's analyzing psychological trends, he's analyzing politics. He's analyzing
these things not from a fidistic perspective or as an
(56:00):
evangelist who's out to convince you to be a Christian.
That's not his perspective. He's simply showing you what he's
discovering and how it's for you, how it's for your
good and for the good of society to discover these things.
So that is I think an essential contribution for philosophy
to make.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
Yeah, anyway, Christie, we're past the end of the hour.
Speaker 5 (56:26):
You can know.
Speaker 3 (56:28):
Are you good for another five minutes?
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (56:30):
Sure, sure, I'm good for it. I love talking, so
you can get me to just get me going. I'll
just keep going.
Speaker 3 (56:38):
And I think of ways of presenting philosophy. My way
is to put together a lot of footnotes.
Speaker 4 (56:54):
What you need is really a lot of footnotes, a
lot of footnotes. Yeah, the history of it? Yeah, yeah,
you need.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
But from that, the last question that I'd like you
to address is what might Guardini say here we are
today today about AI? Oh?
Speaker 4 (57:19):
Yeah, it's terrifying, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (57:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (57:23):
I saw that question. I'm like, oh, that's a hard one.
What would Gardini say about AI? You know, at the
end of his life looking at what was before him?
And in some ways AI is just another exponential growth
on the technocratic and technological advances that we've already seen.
It just bumps it up to another degree. But I
(57:46):
think it's similar in many ways of a technology that
escapes our grasp. In many ways, this is an amazing
capacity that we have as human beings to create something
that well quite honestly could enslave us and escape our
our power of control and our ability to handle responsibly.
(58:11):
In all of this, what really comes to me is
Guardini's contribution to the importance of truth, and along with it,
his hope at the end of his life that the
real place of transformation of the world, the real pivotal
place of where the culture, where culture is created and
(58:31):
shaped and guided, is the conscience of man. So the
place in which all of us stand before God alone,
responsible for ourselves and responsible for our lives, with a
responsibility toward truth, a responsibility toward goodness. And he turned
really his attention at the end of his career toward
(58:51):
cultivating those conditions in which man's conscience could be.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Formed and.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
Be healthy. So the need for prayer a place, the
need for silence, the need for contact with God. So
I would say, like in regard to AI, those two
things I think are really important. First of all, that
(59:22):
whenever we develop a technology, we need a corresponding growth
in our interior responsibility for it and our acknowledgment of
that responsibility. And this is tricky because I'm responsible for
things that you aren't and vice versa, and you can't
be responsible on my behalf. This is something where the
buck stops at every person. Right, every person contributes to
(59:45):
the improvement or the decline of our world by their
personal stands before God and the way that they live
their lives. So that's that interior freedom, or that interior
need for the formation of conscience so that we can
exercise our freedom responsibly. The other part of that is
the conviction of the importance of truth. So AI gives
(01:00:09):
us the ability to lie in ways that are absolutely
profoundly destructive. And if there was something that needed to
be examined, I would think that it's and regulated, it
would be the way in which AI lies. Now, there
is such a thing as art and the fabrication of
(01:00:30):
creativity and the fabrication of artificial things. But where you
create a world of deep fakes and an inability to
distinguish between fact and fiction, between truth and reality, you
are destroying your society. I listened to someone, and I
forget the name of this person. They were suggesting that
(01:00:51):
they're involved in the process of this creation of AI,
and they were suggesting that it needs to be made
illegal to create artificial persons, that that needs to become
a punishable offense, so creating bots, for example, that influence
(01:01:12):
social media and opinion polls, etc. That the creation of
fake persons and of false of deep fakes, and of
false images needs to be punished and needs to be
regulated in a very strict sense. And I think that
that makes a lot of sense. That we really need
as a society to be convicted about the importance of truth.
(01:01:32):
We've come to a real crisis on this and the
challenges that we faith in dialoguing and pursuing truth. Understanding
it cannot be an excuse for allowing us to continue
on this path. We're on a path of self destruction.
We must recover the importance of truth and begin explaining that,
showing that, and standing by it at all levels of
(01:01:56):
our society. So I think hopefully Guardian would agree with
me on that one. I think you would, and I'll
just you know, buy that and throw out Guardini's book
on the Virtues. I encourage everyone to buy it. It's
available in English, and he has a chapter there on
truthfulness and how it's the foundation of society. And I
(01:02:17):
think his book on the Virtues would be a wonderful
thing for people to read and allow the patrimony, the
legacy of Guardini to bear fruit in our American culture today.
So thank you, Yeah, you're welcome, thank you, thank you
for inviting me on you.
Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
Well, we just might have some final words from Christopher though.
Speaker 5 (01:02:39):
All right, oh, I don't know about that. I don't
think everything else to say, except I was going to
point out that I had a similar experience with you
many years ago, back in the nineties. I think it was.
I was on a panel discussion with in West Hollywood,
very seemingly hostilely as a Catholic hostelin environment, and one
(01:03:02):
of the panelists was producer Hollywood producer full of all
Hollywood types, and the other one was the chief ecumenical
officer I think was the Universal Church of God again
lesbian church. So at one point she challenged she I
was asked about basically my approach to truth, and I said,
(01:03:23):
I expressed I did believe that there was true there's
some things where you're truly false, are truly or truly true,
And so she launched often to this thing about the
idea that your true, you're I'm right, and you're wrong
has led to all sorts of persecution and evil throughout
the world. So she was lowly everybody to sleep at
(01:03:46):
that point. So I just said to her, I said, well,
but if I disagree with that, Richard hath said, when
you have to say that I was wrong? And she said,
let's ask the audience. Well, the most amazing thing was
that these people had never heard the con such a
truth like that, they had never heard the principal non contradiction.
They were absolutely excited over it. I was. I was
mobbed at the end of the meeting by people asking
(01:04:09):
me questions about this. So there is a I think
there is a there's a kind of basic common sense.
It still exists even in Hollywood. If you can find
it in Hollywood, you probably find almost any place, maybe
even rural Ohio. And so I think you're right about that.
It's just that somebody didn't get into this, end of
(01:04:29):
the day, the whole question of culture, right when when
you have a deep skepticism in infecting the culture, you're
actually it's very difficult to work against that. And so
even if you make some advances, I often feel like
you're being pushed back at the same time. So it's
just random.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Yeah, Well, I also think it's good to have a
plan B which is why we here on the open
door taking names. What do we run into people who
disagree with us? In case the dialogue doesn't ultimately work out,
(01:05:17):
we are taking names with plan B. Well, you don't
want to hear plans, So let's return, as we always do,
to the source of things, God's word, and the gospel
for today is from Matthew. At that time, Jesus withdrew
(01:05:39):
to the region of tire Insidon, and behold, a Canaanite
woman of that district came and called out, have pity
on me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is tormented
by a demon. But he did not say a word
in answer to her. His disciples came and asked him
send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.
(01:06:02):
He said in reply, I was sent only to the
lost sheep of the House of Israel. But the woman
came and did him homage, saying, Lord, help me. He
said in reply, it is not right to take the
food of the children and throw it to the dogs.
(01:06:24):
She said, please Lord, for even the dogs eat the
scraps that fall from the table of their masters. Then
Jesus said to her in reply, a woman, great is
your faith, let it be done for you as you wish,
and her daughter was healed from that hour. Come Lord Jesus, come,
(01:06:51):
Thank you so much, Christine, thank you, thank you, yeah,
thank you. Fine, all right, that was great, really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (01:07:09):
Well, thanks for having me on. And always a pleasure
to meet a friend of Monsignor Gallus. So I'm glad
you all are doing this podcast out in California, of
all places, so the lions Den, Chris.
Speaker 3 (01:07:24):
Christopher used to live here.
Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
Where are you now, Christopher? Oh, Central Ohio? Okay? I
did my masks at Franciscan.
Speaker 5 (01:07:35):
Okay, yeah, but that's about it's about two and a
half hours from we live. We lived in almost in
the center of the state, a very significant town here
in Ohio, population four hundred.
Speaker 4 (01:07:49):
Oh wow.
Speaker 5 (01:07:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
He carries the flag for the American Solidarity Party. Oh wow.
Speaker 4 (01:07:56):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (01:07:57):
I'm a village Johnson, so that's that's small flag. But
he keeps systems, you know, most not many high political
philosophical discussions and the village of Hartford village council. It's
mostly about the sewer.
Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
You got the territory, all right, You got to take.
Speaker 4 (01:08:22):
Care of those necessities to get to that other I know.
Speaker 5 (01:08:25):
Most of local governments about moving one water from one
place to another. Yeah, think of the agent romans. That
was their focus. All right, God speak to you all.
Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
Thank you, God.
Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Bless Hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabel Mosley, author, professor of
theology and host of them Sings My Soul and Destination
Sainthood on w c A T Radio. I invite you
to listen in and find inspiration along this sacred journey.
We're traveling together to make our lives a masterpiece and
(01:08:59):
with God's grace, become saints. Join me Annabel Moseley for
then sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio.
God bless you. Remember you are never alone. God is
always with you.
Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
Thank you for listening to a production of WCAT Radio.
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget Love lifts up when knowledge takes flight.
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