Re: Enlightened & "Update Your Understanding"

G.K. Chesterton wrote in one of his books in which he railed against the errors prevalent in his day that "if all goes well," then in the future "this book will be unintelligible gibberish."

I think this same sort of effect accounts for much of the rift between Peter's thought and that embodied in Msgr. Shannon's article.  Our elders were extremely successful in combating many of the chief vices, errors, and weaknesses of their age and in preventing them from being passed on to the next generation.  Not only were they successful, but the change they effected was so thorough and so sudden that if they continue to think and act in the way they have been accustomed to their entire lives (which is difficult not to do), they may have trouble making young people understand what it is they are talking about.  To us they seem to be in the position of someone who has not only been beating a dead horse, but has even continued to beat it long after the corpse has rotted away and disintegrated, so that if you didn't know that there used to be a horse there, you would wonder what madness makes them keep whacking at the ground with such fury.

I would say that the problems I have with that article are not so much factual issues as issues of tone and emphasis.  That is, any particular thing in it, if you challenged it, you would find that there is a sense in which it is not inaccurate, and I suspect that is the sense it is meant in.  Not that that helps us if it's sufficiently foreign to us - the "JP2 Generation."

In particular, the use of the word "literal" was a poor choice, because "literal" is one of those words whose meaning isn't anchored to much of anything, so that in order to use it effectively you have to pretty sure that your audience is going to take it in the same way you mean it, or there will be confusion (kind of like the word "liberal").  Perhaps Msgr. Shannon is constantly beset by ueber-pragramatist/reductionist kind of people who assume that their version of literal is the safest way to guard orthodoxy and in doing so they forget to ever think about the fullness of the actual teaching.  That wouldn't have even occurred to Peter, who, if you asked him, would probably describe Christ's Eucharistic presence as "Body, blood, soul, and divinity" whole and entire in each particle or drop.  Another thing that Msgr. Shannon may have to deal with (or have had to deal with) is what some people derisively call the "better living through chemistry" approach to the Eucharist - the mistaken notion that Catholics believe that at the consecration the atoms and molecules of the bread rearrange so that the bread turns into our Lord's body that way - but God intervenes to deceive your senses so that you still see/feel/smell/taste bread (this isn't what the Church teaches, but perhaps you can see how someone might mistakenly think so).  This is where you have Catholics who both actually believe what the Church teaches about the Eucharist confusing each other when one of them says that the Eucharist is/isn't the "physical" presence, etc., and isn't clear about what he means by that, and the other misunderstands, and there's headaches all around before things get sorted out.

Now what I'm not so fond of is all the medieval-bashing I see in it.  I know when you're trying to make a point it's natural to exaggerate how right you are and how wrong the other other guy is.  It's like when Hilaire Belloc's Protestant opponents wrote history books about how a certain Catholic monarch was the most loathsome, villainous, vile scum ever to walk the earth and he countered with books about how he was really the most virtuous, upright, and noble king ever to grace the earth, when the fact was that he had his good and bad - but you couldn't counter by saying this because people will read that as you as much as conceding that your opponent was right.  But when you're talking to people (like us) who don't glorify every aspect of 1940s Catholicism as the pinnacle of perfection it doesn't make any sense to take the "how could they have been so stupid" approach to people who lived before the Liturgical Movement, nor to dismiss everything that came out of the medieval period, because you'll only make yourself look, well, wrong to people who can see anything good in the Church in former times.