The Vatican is warning against \u201cmiracle-performing sensationalism\u201d and too enthusiastic a veneration of relics:<\/p>\n
Even the veneration of relics, [writes Wall Street Journal columnist Francis Rocca<\/a>, the Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service,] mocked by the Protestant reformers and long downplayed by Catholic leaders, is becoming more popular\u2014to the point that a Vatican theologian last year saw the need to warn against the “risk of crossing the boundary from popular devotion to superstition” and “substituting miracle-performing sensationalism for authentic faith.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Unfortunately, Rocca does not disclose how the Vatican distinguishes \u201cpopular devotion\u201d from \u201csuperstition\u201d or \u201cmiracle-performing sensationalism\u201d from \u201cauthentic faith.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This official caveat strikes me as akin to admonishing someone to stay just a little bit pregnant.\u00a0\u00a0 Undoubtedly, the Vatican regards the Virgin Birth, Jesus walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, the Resurrection, the efficacy of saints, God\u2019s amenability to petitionary prayer, and most other aspects of Christian lore as falling in the \u201cauthentic faith,\u201d rather than in \u201cmiracle-performing sensationalism,\u201d side of the ledger, though the parceling out of various miracles into one camp or the other would seem to have more to do with tradition than with any empirically-determined distinction among them.\u00a0 How many saints do you get to pray to a day as a prophylactic against harm before you have become superstitious?<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, this Vatican statement illustrates the ongoing corralling of religion by a secular, naturalistic understanding of the world.\u00a0 That the Catholic hierarchy could be embarrassed by relic veneration, when nearly every Catholic Church in Europe proudly displays its lavish, silver and gold jewel-encrusted reliquaries allegedly housing this bit of Jesus\u2019 femur or that bit of a saint\u2019s bladder, shows how the religious practices that once filled out a world still untamed and unexplained by science grow ineluctably more remote.\u00a0 Of course, I shouldn\u2019t overstate the extent to which humanity is embracing an empirical posture towards reality.\u00a0 I overhear too many conversations in the ladies locker room of my gym promoting this or that homeopathic remedy on the ground that the taker\u2019s cold got better after she ingested the alleged cure to truly suppose that everyone waits for strong evidence before believing whatever claim is presented to him.\u00a0 And of course, Rocca\u2019s column itself testifies to (and celebrates) a resurgence in relic worship:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many Catholics, especially among the educated in wealthy countries, regard such practices as embarrassing vestiges of medieval piety, distractions from a more sophisticated spirituality. Yet a scene this month in St. Peter’s Square, broadcast on television around the world, sent another message. The sight of a nun displaying a silver reliquary with the blood of the newly beatified Pope John Paul II, to applause from a crowd of 1.5 million devotees, suggests that demand remains strong for a brand of faith that celebrates its difference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Amusingly, Rocca\u2019s \u201cyet\u201d in the above passage purports to be signaling a contradiction, as if the sheer numbers of relic worshippers refutes the fact that such veneration is a \u201cvestige of medieval piety.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Still, the march of thought at least in the West circumscribes the once totalizing impulses of religion and puts its once mandatory rituals and its explanations for reality into a box marked \u201creligion\u2014handle with care.\u201d\u00a0 Promoters of a more flamboyantly supernatural form of Christianity like Rocca and David Bentley Hart purport to be undaunted by the fact that such charismatic forms are flourishing most in the least educated places on earth, such as Africa and the Caribbean.\u00a0 Do we really want to emulate the belief systems of Africans?\u00a0 Rocca also applauds some Bishops\u2019 call for a return to meatless Fridays.\u00a0 I will know that religious Americans in particular are ready to walk the walk and not just talk the talk of religious obedience when Christian leaders start calling for shopping malls to shut down on Sundays in observance of the Fourth Commandment.\u00a0 Until then, it looks to me that the needs of modern consumer capitalism take precedence over God\u2019s sacred commandment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Vatican is warning against \u201cmiracle-performing sensationalism\u201d and too enthusiastic a veneration of relics: Even the veneration of relics, [writes Wall Street Journal columnist Francis Rocca, the Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service,] mocked by the Protestant reformers and long … Continue reading