Learning from the best at being human

26 Jul 2013

By Robert Hiini

Bishop Anthony Fisher OP speaks at UNDA’s Tradition 2013 conference. PHOTO: Robert Hiini

Is everyone supposed to be involved in traditional understanding? How far back and to what extent should one appropriate the tradition? … Everyone is interested in ‘human making’, in making themselves as a moral agent.

People are interested in that, whether they realise it or not… the project of ‘writing my autobiography’ and cultivating a sort of character…

You don’t learn a craft, including the craft of human making, of the moral life, just from a book or from being told “get on with it” or, in other words, “follow your conscience”.

That looks to me like being given the wood [Using the analogy of violin making] and being told to “get on with it”. You actually need to see great practitioners making violins.

You need to be shown by someone who is good at violin making… You need to be incorporated into this craft and gradually you come to understand not just a syllabus of skills… you learn in the end, well what a violin is and what makes a good violin.

So the analogy is that in human making, again we need to see the great practitioners at being human beings; people who are really good at being human beings, doing it; and we need their help; we need them showing us, inducting us into the craft of human making, human being, human becoming…

That thought, I think, means that “who needs to be interested in tradition? Every human being”…

We can’t help but do it. We might think “well, I’m going to be a liberal so I’ll abandon all traditions” but I am in fact entering a particular tradition of thought when I do that.

Very likely, I’ve still got all sorts of fragments from other traditions in my life that I possibly slavishly still follow.

We are going to be involved in tradition of one kind or another anyway, so part of what I am proposing here is to be a little more conscious of what we’re up to and be open to the goodness of that…

You used the term dogmas [when speaking about Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae] saying it contained three dogmas. It was my understanding that the type of authority used in the document was ordinary, not extraordinary?

Secondly, does the Church have the authority to teach definitively with respect to concrete moral norms, particularly on issues such as IVF, human life and so on?

Are there moral dogmas? I think we can point to some fairly easily – the Decalogue, [Ten Commandments] for instance, is restated again and again at different points in the Gospels by Christ himself and then Paul and the writers of the New testament and ever since, as something that has not in any way been abrogated by the coming of the newborn, the event of Jesus Christ.

Or we might point to the teaching of the Council of Trent in trying to define marriage.

It might be a surprise to contemporary men and women that Trent defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, and only one at a time, of each [laughs], and that has clear moral implications in that document which even has word anathema sit attached to it, for those who seem to need that to recognise a dogma.

But in the case of the three dogmas, as I’ve called them, taught in Evangelium Vitae, I have written elsewhere on this matter…

I think the language surrounding it where he says [paraphrased] “I, Peter, by virtue of my apostolic authority, having consulted all the bishops in the world on this question, following the repeated teaching of the Scriptures and the tradition and all my predecessors and popes” and he goes through that, and it’s “boom, boom, boom”.

It’s like every possible arrow and flashing light that you could have – short of him putting on a triple tiara and sitting in the biggest gold chair the BBC could find him.

What I am teaching here, and… about the intrinsic evil of killing – directly killing, intentionally killing the innocent – I don’t know what more a Pope could do to teach by virtue of his extraordinary magisterium as well as ordinary magisterium in a moral matter or indeed any kind of matter…

As for “can there be concrete moral norms”… It seems to me that those who seek to exclude it, in fact, are denying the teaching of the Church and teaching authority of leading doctrine and morals, and some of them are explicit about that.

They say “it’s mores, and it refers to what kind of hats you wear at Mass but it doesn’t refer to morals” and that version, it seems to me, of Catholic self-understanding is terribly hard to square with what the Catholic Church has actually done for 2000 years.

Many people complain that it moralises too much, it’s forever out there telling people what to do. I don’t think that’s fair but how on earth do you understand this Church and say it doesn’t purport to teach authoritatively in moral matters? That’s what it’s doing very often in its history.

If you go right back to the Manicheans and others, forward to what the Church is doing with something like IVF today… look at what the Church is doing as part of understanding what the Church is.

And I think if we then look at the trilogy [of moral encyclicals promulgated by Pope John Paul II in the 1990s]… he proposed that the Church can and does teach authoritatively in moral matters, sometimes by extraordinary magisterium, sometimes by ordinary magisterium. But the ordinary magisterium consistently held through 20 centuries, universal amongst the bishops, is very often the way the Church teaches.

Now where is the council of the Church that said that adultery or that lying is bad. “Unless I have a definition by a pope who’s wearing his triple tiara and says anathema sit under it, I’m not going to accept the Church’s [definitive teaching].

Well, anyone understanding the Catholic thing, the Christian thing, knows the Church teaches definitively that adultery and lying are wrong and that’s because the Church often teaches in moral matters and doctrinal matters using the ordinary magisterium, the ordinary way of teaching, that it does right down through the centuries, and across the world.

When does small ‘t’ tradition become big ‘T’ Tradition?

The answer is certainly not when it’s 500 years old or 30 years old…

The small ‘t’ traditions do make concrete something deeper that is the Tradition… [They] authentically express, for now, the Sacred Tradition – that which has been handed down to us from the Apostles and which we are grappling, at this time in history, best to express and live and hand on.

We might do that by popes wearing black shoes, but much more seriously we do it by things like the way good people live and testify to their faith by their lives; we do that by the beauty of the sacred liturgy; we do that by various acts of the teaching and clarifying of that teaching.