book reviews

Preparing for marriage
JOURNEY OF FAITH: CATHOLIC MARRIAGE PREPARATION. By Roy Barkley (Queenship Publishing Co., P.O. Box 220, Goleta, CA. 2002), viii+111 pp. PB $7.95.

One can only hope that this outstanding work will be adopted by hundreds of Catholic parishes, for it could conceivably play an important role in the renewal of Catholicism in this land. The book derives from the author’s experience as deacon in preparing young couples for marriage in the Diocese of Austin, Texas. Dr. Barkley presents a solidly Catholic view of marriage, articulating it with simplicity, sincerity and eloquence. In the course of nine chapters he provides a deep understanding of “what Christ proposes through his Church about marriage” to make it a “holy, joyful, and permanent union.” For this hugely important task, he draws especially from the writings of John Paul II: Familiaris Consortio (1982), Love and Responsibility (1991), Letter to Families (1994), The Theology of the Body (1997), Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Evangelium Vitae (1997). He also cites, among other works, Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, William May’s Marriage (1995), and documents of Vatican II. Having thoroughly digested all this material, he offers the Catholic view of marriage in stirring prose.

In the first chapter, couples preparing for marriage learn that no society has the right to alter the moral law about sexuality and marriage, so “We must form our consciences by the teaching of the Church, whose long, Spirit-guided experience has produced an unrivaled treasure of wisdom about the conduct of human life.” Deacon Barkley challenges these couples to enter a Catholic marriage and be a sign of contradiction amidst “the decay of fidelity all around us.” He shows how marriage is not a human invention, but a sacrament and a vocation: it is “one of God’s mysteries” too profound for the human intellect to grasp and a lifelong calling characterized by “self-sacrifice and mutual self-giving.”

Then Deacon Barkley deals with a Catholic understanding of chastity, without which real marital love cannot exist. He notes the crisis of morality in the “American Church,” where young couples already living together come to prepare for the sacrament of matrimony without fully realizing the sinfulness of their cohabitation. He sees it as necessary to inform such couples that they have violated the “teaching authority of the Church” regarding chastity, because a commitment to marriage is something “chosen, not produced by hormones,” an act of will governing every other kind of love. Thus, cohabitation before matrimony is a “sinful trap” that will lead to failed marriages—indeed 70% of those who are cohabiting before marriage end up divorced. Evidently, sexual intercourse impedes preparation for marriage, since it “keeps a young man and woman from knowing each other as they should.” The way out of this trap is for the couple to undergo a change of heart, pray, receive the sacrament of reconciliation, abstain from sexual intercourse during their preparation for marriage, and thus restore themselves to chastity. He even urges the couple to tell their relatives of their resolve and undo the scandal. In a memorable passage, he wittily compares a “trial marriage” to a “trial priesthood” and concludes, “Unmarried people have no more right to the privileges of marriage than a layman has to celebrate Mass.” Here Barkley also deals with the several impediments to marriage.

The author next provides a clear understanding of how the sacrament of marriage is not a one-time ceremony, but an ongoing activity for the whole of married life: “The sacrament is Christ made present daily throughout married life, through His ministers, the married man and woman. Their life together is a sign of His presence.” While Christians have a duty to imitate Christ in their charity to neighbor, Barkley observes, their duty in marriage is of a wholly different kind, for here the spouse continually acts “as a minister of one of the Church’s special sacraments.” The husband and the wife are each the bearer of Christ to the other in conjugal charity, bearing a “gentle yoke.” Barkley then discusses in depth St. Paul’s mysterious analogy for matrimony: that the husband is like Christ the Head, and the wife like his Body the Church.

The fourth hard-hitting chapter deals with sexuality as “a defining part of human nature.” Barkley cites John Paul II on how a “whole person” is one whose being is an expression of either maleness or femaleness. Thus, sexuality is a fundamental aspect of each one and demands “respect”; it is not something extrinsic capable of being altered at will with gadgets and chemicals. With regard to the basic truth “that men and women are different,” Barkley explains, our postmodern culture is in “a wildly irrational state of denial” that undermines marriage. It rejects the revealed truth that sexuality is at the “unchangeable core of creation,” that when God created man in his image, “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Furthermore, Barkley shows how the mysterious interpersonal communion between spouses is modeled on the communion of persons in the Trinity. For the married couple is more than the sum of its parts: the two become one, an image of the divine “We.” Making sexual intercourse a compulsive routine puts aside the mystery and degrades sexuality, leading “not only to a failure of life for those who engage in it, but to an eternal failure in separation from God” In this section, we find a frank discussion, too, of adultery, fornication, masturbation and the use of pornography. Barkley advises couples to marry only if they are resolved “to avoid even the temptation to adultery” and explains that masturbators “reassert a false and non-marital ownership” over their sexual functions, while users of pornography become addicted to sexual fantasies about strangers whom they regard as mere objects.

Turning to the procreation of children, the author eloquently repudiates the notion that only the wanted child has value, while the unwanted child is worthless, as if human beings conferred value on each other. He unfolds the Church’s view of every child as “a gift beyond measure” and of human beings born and unborn as “unique and irreplaceable individuals, endowed by God with a value, a dignity that cannot be given by man or taken away by him.” He writes of the rebellion against Humanae Vitae after 1968 (calling that encyclical “beautiful” and “important”) and notes how the rise of contraception among Catholics corresponded with a rise in their divorce rate. He shows contraception as undermining the dignity of matrimony and contributing to cultural decline, and challenges couples preparing for Catholic marriage to “dare to be different,” declaring in one impassioned passage:

More subtly, when a man says to a woman, “I want you on the pill so we won’t have to worry about your getting pregnant,” he is saying in effect, “I love you but not the you that God created. I love only an altered version of you. I reject the part of you that most deeply characterizes your feminine nature.” That is not love. More subtly still, whenever people decide to use contraception, they abandon the control of reason and give themselves over to the control of their hormones.

Carefully distinguishing it from the rhythm method, Barkley shows natural family planning as leading a couple to a beautiful serenity as they acquire “a deep knowledge of each other as images of God” and a “corresponding respect” for each other’s bodies.

The author then turns to the family and shows two models to be insufficient for Catholics: the civil-contract model and the master-servant model. He sees the latter as a tyranny wrongly believed to be authorized by Scripture, even though St. Paul teaches not only about the husband’s headship but also about “mutual subjection.” Barkley explains how in their sacramental relationship, husband and wife must defer to each other habitually “as each would defer to Christ,” for “Christ truly operates” in each spouse who acts as “minister of that sacrament.” The presence of husbands and fathers, then, “though authoritative in the final analysis, must not be ‘oppressive,’ as John Paul II urges in his warning against “the phenomenon of ‘machismo’” that humiliates women. Besides showing mutual deference, Christian spouses need to embrace the family elders and become a “communion of generations.” The family is thus a domestic church, a miniature Catholic Church, a unit for building up the great “civilization of love,” where children learn to pursue holiness, practice virtue, and give service to mankind. The Christian family does not turn in upon itself, but allows those not in its fold to be its “beneficiaries” too. In this section, too, we learn of the various ways families may fail to resolve conflicts, such as by one’s presuming to know another’s motives and intentions. The failure to love underlies the failure to reconcile, for though emotions are tied up with love, Barkley explains, love is a “deliberately chosen commitment of the welfare of the beloved.”

The penultimate chapter is on stewardship, on the couple’s living in the knowledge that possessions are less important than each other and their marriage and less important too than the lives of the poor. Barkley exposes the danger of postponing children until financial security is achieved. It is a “failure of faith” in which money and career are often put ahead of the raising of children “in the Body of Christ.” He shows almsgiving as not an option but an obligation, urging couples to support their parish and the poor with time, labor, and money, as well as to support “such Godly causes as the pro-life movement.” He delves into the making of financial plans and the resolving on financial habits before marriage, since problems with money are frequently involved in divorce. The final chapter is on planning the ceremony and choosing the readings, prayers, and music, yet even here, the author is focused on the spiritual. Each chapter ends with a list of pertinent questions for discussion, and the final pages contain excellent suggestions for further reading, such as Dr. Thomas Hilgers’ fine book, The Medical Applications of Natural Family Planning: A Contemporary Approach to Women’s Health Care (Omaha, Nebraska: Pope Paul VI Institute Press, 200l) on the “Creighton Method” of natural family planning, a “highly effective and highly recommended” method.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner - John Jay College, City University of New York - New York, N.Y.

The current cultural crisis
THE DEATH OF THE WEST. By Patrick J. Buchanan (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 308 pp. HB $25.95.

This work by Buchanan soberly charts the cultural crisis and tragedy that confronts us: 1) a demographic implosion of birth rates in the West; 2) the role of the courts and the media in undermining stable family life and assaulting our religious heritage; and 3) the radical feminist assault on motherhood, fatherhood, and the innocence and vulnerability of the child.

Similar to Robert George’s recent work, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, Buchanan is exceptionally helpful in defining the problem we’re up against, and charting at least some of the historical antecedents of our present predicament. What, if anything, we can do about it, is the hard part.

In 1960, the people of Europe and the United States were 30% of the world’s population. Today we’re 15%; by 2050 we’ll be 7%, and a generation later about 3%. “Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the 14th century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization,” pp. 11-25).

Analyzing the role of the courts, he cites the recent symposium in First Things on The Judicial Usurpation of Politics: “Half a century ago, the Supreme Court was captured by Judicial ideologues . . . out went the 10 commandments, in came condoms, abortions, and Heather Has 2 Mommies. . . . In 1962, prayer was outlawed. In 1963, voluntary reading from the Bible was declared unconstitutional. In 1980, a Kentucky law that called for posting the 10 commandments on classroom walls was overturned. In 1988, Alabama’s “moment of silence” at the start of the school day was declared unconstitutional” (pp. 183-204). So it was that secularism was awarded custody of America’s public schools and public square, and the “atheistic hedonism” of the A.C.L.U. was imposed on the nation as its “established religion and faith” in direct defiance of the First Amendment.

The media assault on the moral order in favor of a “militant secular individualism focused on the self” is reflected in rampant promiscuity, wholesale divorce, the explosion of pornography, the mainstreaming of a playboy philosophy, and obscene art. On “hate crimes,” for example, the killing of a Matthew Shepherd gets 3,000 stories in the major media in the first month after his brutal murder, while that of Jesse Dirkhising, equally vicious, gets virtually none. In another fairly bizarre example of media bias, the 30 murders of young men by John Wayne Gacy does not qualify as a “hate crime,” but if he had been beaten up outside a gay bar, that would have qualified.

Early feminists had been fiercely anti-abortion, but latter day radical feminists promote a bitter and hostile attitude toward children, marriage, and the family, reflected partly in the relative incidence of abortion: from 6,000 in 1966 to 1-1/2 to 2 million per year from 1976 to the present—40 million children killed. It also surfaces in a 1,000% increase in the number of unmarried couples living together and co-habiting. The woman’s magazines, the soaps, romance novels, and prime time T.V. all celebrate career, sex, and the single life: taking care of a child is degrading and unfulfilling. The twin pre-occupations are looks and money, with government-subsidized day care, to ensure maximum pleasure and “freedom.”

In conclusion, he writes, “the statistics of the culture war on abortion, divorce, a collapsing birth rate, single parent homes à 1a Murphy Brown, teen suicides, school shootings, drug abuse, child abuse, skyrocketing crimes rates, and falling test scores show how our society is decomposing and dying . . . candor compels one to admit that the prognosis is not good. Western man may be living out the final act of a tragedy. . . . Deny that God’s laws are binding, rage against them, you still cannot escape the consequences of living outside of nature and nature’s God” (pp. 243-244).

As always, the solution is orthodox Christian faith in its fullness, with its common moral tradition—the 10 commandments —as articulated and sustained by an honest faith. Unfortunately, it appears that with less and less time for repentance, it seems likely that the current rebellion and sinfulness may end in disaster.

Even a return to the Church and honest faith or renewed commitment to stable family life will continue to be undermined by corruption in our schools, the media, politics, and the courts. By being faithful to Christ, however, we can win this war on the battlefield of our own souls—and pray for a miracle. In addition, though the objective reality is serious enough, only God can sort through the subjective factors: what did they know, and what, if any, freedom did they have. Only God can “separate the wheat from the chaff.” Our prayer must be one with Christ’s from the cross: “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

Rev. Edward Krause, Ph.D. - Gannon University - Erie, Pa.

Renewal in moral theology
INTRODUCTION TO MORAL THEOLOGY. By Romanus Cessario, O.P., Catholic University of America Press, CUA Press Order Dept., P.O. Box 50370, Baltimore, MD 21211, 2001), 268 pp. PB $24.95; HB $44.95.

Vatican II’s Optatam Totius explicitly called for a renewal of moral theology. Much of the past thirty-five years in the West, however, have been lost to new moral systems dubiously claiming to be Catholic, some even asserting Thomistic roots. Veritatis Splendor clearly separated Catholic moral theology from its pretenders and authentic Catholic moral theologians continue to advance a genuine aggiornamento in that discipline.

One sign such renewal is occurring is this book, the first volume of the “Catholic Moral Thought” series being published by The Catholic University of America Press. The schools and methodologies of the individual authors will be different, testifying to the genuine pluralism of authentic Catholic moral theology, but the series will be unified by an orthodox commitment to the “divine and Catholic faith[,] to the once and for all divine revelation that the Church of Christ safeguards. . . (p. xi).

Volume one, on fundamental moral theology, is the work of the contemporary Dominican Thomist, Romanus Cessario. Cessario.’s philosophical perspective and his previous writings (e.g., The Moral Virtues and Christian Ethics) mark the paramount strengths of this book: a genuine Thomistic fundamental moral theology that affords centrality to the virtues. This is not just another book claiming to be part of the “Thomistic tradition”; it bases itself upon St. Thomas and repeatedly returns to the sources. At the same time it is contemporary, emphasizing the Trinitarian, Christological and anthropological foci so central to modern moral theology (foci that also structure Thomas’s writings). The human person made by God en route to God, the architectonic principle of the Summa, is also the central theme of modern moral theology. Cessario describes his perspective simply as “moral realism.”

In five chapters, Cessario treats the “starting point” of moral theology (sacra doctrina, man as imago Dei, and the relation of human flourishing to beatitude), natural law, the virtues, moral acts, and living the life of virtue in freedom. An appendix examines how casuistry undermined the centrality of the virtues in Catholic moral theology.

Reading this book one realizes just how much work remains to be done towards the renewal of Catholic moral theology. Gerard Gilleman talked about the need to recover focus on the virtues back in 1952. Cessario, following his mentor Servais Pinckaers, persuasively makes the case for how much the virtues still remain neglected in moral theology. Proportionalism, with its attention to individual acts, can arguably be said to have given the worst of casuistry a new lease on life.

The reviewer’s one hesitation about this book is the author’s writing style. While the subject matter is not easy, neither is Cessario’s style: one slogs through it. Over sixty years ago, Walter Farrell’s Companion to the Summa made Thomas accessible through his felicity and simplicity of style. Romanus Cessario is no Walter Farrell.

The book describes itself as targeted at upper division collegians and graduate students of theology. Most students will need a professor to understand this book well. The same is true of seminarians (especially the increasing numbers for whom English is a foreign language). Priests seeking a solid introduction to Thomistic ethics can turn here but be forewarned: this is not bedtime reading. Recommended.

Dr. John M. Grondelski - Warsaw, Poland

Eucharistic catechesis
CATHOLICS AND THE EUCHARIST: A SCRIPTURAL INTRODUCTION. By Stephen B. Clark (Servant Publications/ Charis Books, P.O. Box 8617 Ann Arbor, MI 48107, 2000), 273 pp. PB. $11.99

In times like ours, when there seems to be confusion and ignorance concerning some of the essential elements of our Catholic faith or at least a somewhat shallow understanding of them, it is a great encouragement to be able to recommend Catholics and the Eucharist to laity and clergy alike both as an instrument of profound growth and enrichment in one’s own Eucharistic renewal as well as an outstanding example of Eucharistic catechesis eminently useful for assisting others. Irenic in style and deeply ecumenical in spirit, reflecting the author’s long experience as a teacher of the Christian Faith, Catholics and the Eucharist is also a valuable tool for explaining the Catholic understanding and practice of this Sacrament to other Christians whose faith is deeply rooted in the Scriptures as well as to the non-Christian inquirer who may wonder what to make of the rich and complex pattern of words and actions which comprise the Catholic experience.

Biblical faith rests upon the foundational experience of God speaking and acting in our world such that we can understand what he is doing, respond to it and so come to live in a way that brings us into an ever closer relationship with him. Steve Clark explains that, beginning with creation itself, God makes use of instruments by which he can communicate with us and transform us. Here lie the beginnings of a grasp of Eucharistic worship whose structure combines both instruments in the person of Jesus who is himself the Communication (i.e., the Word) of the Father to us and who transforms us as we ingest his very Body and Blood.

The Scriptures provide the indispensable key to an authentic understanding of the Eucharist. The Hebrew Scriptures reveal the pattern of divine worship, elements of which are indispensable to a fruitful grasp of New Testament Eucharistic activity. As Clark puts it: “What the first Christians did in the beginning was based in turn on what the Jews did before them, but changed in important ways because of Christ.” Key words such as “the acceptable sacrifice,” the “gift” laid at the altar, the “blood outpoured,” “communion,” “covenant” and many others are clearly explained in their Old Testament context. Most central to the Catholic understanding of Eucharist is the notion of “sacrifice,” but, as Clark notes: “Sacrifices are often referred to in the New Testament but their nature is not explained there. To understand that, we have to go to the Old Testament and see how the Old Testament understood sacrifice, especially in the context of feasts.” This passage is followed by a powerful evocation of an Old Testament feast (say, Pentecost), where the reader can see for himself the forms and rituals that would later be used by the Lord and his followers.

Into the New Testament fulfillment, with the acceptable sacrifice of the Unblemished Lamb and the universal reconciliation it achieves, together with the New Creation it begins, Clark takes each element of Eucharistic worship, so precious and dear to us as Catholics, and unfolds its meaning according to the mind and practice of the Church. Abundant references to the teaching Church and the experiences of the saints illustrate the inspired and canonical Scriptures. The Roman Rite’s Eucharistic Prayer III frames an extensive treatment of the rich and diverse elements of that part of the Mass. The section on the Real Presence contains material so powerful that it can be used, as is, for prayer and meditation.

The study concludes with an exhortation to the worship of the Father, who in the resurrection and ascension of his son has accepted the Acceptable Sacrifice and now, in the outpoured Spirit, draws us ever closer to himself. To that goal Catholics and the Eucharist has been dedicated, as has the life of the author himself. May it be so with every reader.

Fr. Philip Merdinger - Somerville, Mass.

Unimaginative and pedantic
THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE PSALMS. By Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P. (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minn. 56321, 2002), 208 pp. PB $19.95.

Touted as “the last work” of the author, a Passionist priest and biblical scholar, “which was unfinished upon his death in 1994,” this volume’s ostensible purpose is to “contribute to the integration of the Psalms in the Church’s prayer life and ministry” (editor’s preface). In reality the manuscript had sat on a shelf since at least 1986, and the scholarly treatment of the psalms is almost completely at odds with any attempt to derive spiritual benefit from them.

Sheer repetition makes the author’s presuppositions crystal clear. The latest possible dating is assigned to any given psalm. Nature imagery is an indication of Canaanite polytheistic influence. Explicit historical references in psalm titles are suspect, but traces of hypothetical OT liturgies can be inferred at the slightest pretext.

Literary influence is very difficult to prove. (Which text influenced the other? or are both derived from shared experience?) Nevertheless the author declares that the psalter depends on the prophets, including Second Isaiah. While purportedly an application of the historico-critical method, these assumptions actually detach the psalms from their historical moorings.

Even granting the author’s premises, his arguments are unimaginative and pedantic. False contrasts abound (“God the Creator” vs. “God the Redeemer” in the OT; verse 2 is of the “thanksgiving” type while verse 4 is of the “praise” type).

Notes on vocabulary and poetic structure help the reader to appreciate the drama of the Miserere, but then the author claims that it is a medley of Scripture quotations. Most of the “parallel passages” adduced strike this reviewer as exercises in free-association.

The dogmatic insistence upon what is at best conjecture alternately amuses and wearies: hypothesis upon hypothesis, piled high and swaying in the breeze.

The Scripture scholarship here has been sanitized for the widest possible audience. You’ll find no discussion of the Messianic interpretation of many important psalms (which is itself a pre-Christian phenomenon). Patristic commentary and the fourfold interpretation neither illumine nor inform the proceedings.

Instead, Sr. Carol J. Dempsey, O.P., the editor who completed Fr. Stuhlmueller’s draft, has compounded its strange biases by “updating” it. It doesn’t take a redaction critic to distinguish the dry original from the additions and modifications. Sister’s prose veers from schoolmarmish affirmations of progressive opinion to garish description and back to ponderously left-handed remarks about religious authority or the Sacrament of Penance. She treats the reader to an infomercial for the discredited “dynamic equivalence” school of translation, smuggling in a text from an unapproved psalter. Later on there is a bizarre attempt to view the psalms about suffering through a prism of preoccupations with modern health-care issues.

The only “spirituality” possible after all this amounts to a few platitudes and a bit of pop psychology. The clash between good and evil in the psalms is downplayed and the contours between them are blurred, conveniently minimizing the problem of guilt and forgiveness. Bypassing Christ, the Davidic psalms are democratized; kingship is for all believers.

If we compare the Psalter to St. Teresa’s “interior castle,” then most of the author’s efforts are unfortunately directed, not to entering the majestic edifice, but to digging a moat around it and marching in circles therein. Stuhlmueller may not have intended to write about “spirituality,” but so entrenched is he in his academic methods that he fails to realize how disconcerting and barren the results are.

Only Stuhlmueller fans and specialists will read this patchwork of a book. For this reviewer it served as a Rosetta stone, explaining some of the multifarious connections between dubious Scriptural scholarship and what is wrong with post-conciliar academic disciplines at many Catholic universities.

Michael J. Miller - Glenside, Pa.