Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J. Verses The Real Presence

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

In the sixteenth century the rise of Protestantism produced a crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. Whole nations were lost to the Catholic Faith mainly because Catholic leaders especially bishops and theologians were seduced by the so-called reformers. There never was a Protestant reformation, that is in plain Anglo-Saxon a lie, there was only a Protestant rebellion.

Thank God there was a Catholic reformation. Reformers like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola – that is what the Church needs today. Dear Lord how she needs these saintly courageous reformers today. These bishops and theologians, I am now speaking of the sixteenth century, denied that Christ had instituted the Sacrament of Holy Orders and thus conferred upon priests the power to change bread and wine into His own body and blood, and this is the heart of the crisis in the Catholic church today. It is the sixth Chapter of Saint John’s Gospel but now on a global scale.

Pope Paul VI uses two words to summarize this Eucharist Crisis, they are transignification and transfinalization. These terms are a synthesis of the widespread radical ideas pervading once Catholic circles as we enter the third millennium – how well I know. What I will do now is identify the two principal leaders of this devastating Eucharistic error. The error of transignification. This is the view that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist means when the consecration at Mass is performed only a change of meaning or significance of the bread and wine takes place. Their substance do not change only a change of meaning or significance of the bread and wine takes place their substance does not change. The consecrated elements are said to signify all that Christians associate with the Last Supper. The bread and wine acquire a higher meaning than merely food for the body. But they remain bread and wine. 

We get some idea of how deeply this error has penetrated Catholic thought, when we read what Karl Rahner writes about the Eucharistic consecration. Rahner therefore is the first of the two master teachers of profound error on the Real Presence. I will quote now from Rahner’s language, not always so clear, I chose the clearest part that I could find. Quote Karl Rahner, “the more recent approaches suggest the following considerations, one has to remember that the words of institution indicate a change. But not give any guiding line for the interpretation of the actual process. As regarding transubstantiation it may be said, the substance, essence, meaning and purpose of the bread are identical but the meaning of a thing can be changed without changing the matter. The meaning of the bread has been changed through the consecration something which served profane use now becomes the dwelling place and the symbol of Christ who is present and gives Himself to His own.” unquote Karl Rahner. 

 From the Encyclopedia of Theology edited by Rahner and defining the meaning of transubstantiation. What takes place through the Eucharistic consecration the significance the meaning attached to the bread changes but the bread remains bread. Rahner’s ideas are permeating the Eucharistic theology of whole nations.

Link (here) to read the full talk by Fr. John A Hardon, S.J.

Balancing Act: Letters Of Friendship To Karl Rahner

The book is entitled, Gratwanderung: Briefe der Freundschaft an Karl Rahner. That translates into Balancing act: Letters of friendship to Karl Rahner.

Here are some of the contents of the book: It is an image out of sync with the persona of a German academic: Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner on his knees before a woman, overwhelmed with gratitude for his love, for a passionate relationship with a 51-year-old widow and two-time divorcee that would produce some 4,000 letters between 1962 and Rahner's death in 1984. Rahner, considered by many to be the 20th century's most creative Catholic theologian, was 58 when German novelist Luise Rinser played the image back to him in a letter dated Aug. 10, 1962. "My Fish, truly beloved, I cannot express how shaken I was as you knelt before me," she wrote.  

"You were kneeling before the Love that you are experiencing and before which I also kneel in amazement, in reverence, with trembling and with an exultation that I hardly dare to allow myself to feel. We are both touched in the innermost part of our being by something that is much stronger than we anticipated." 

The passage is from letters that Rinser wrote to Rahner over the 22 years of their relationship. Published in German, the letters hold a particular fascination for Pamela Kirk, a theologian who teaches at St. John's University in Jamaica, N.Y. While there has been virtually no public discussion of the letters in the United States, she has delivered two papers on the Rinser-Rahner relationship at the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Link (here) to read the extensive article first published in the National Catholic Reporter

Cardinal Avrey Dulles, S.J. On Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

In September 1968 issue of the America magazine, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J. summarized the views of his fellow Jesuit, Karl Rahner S.J., published in Stimmen der Zeit, on the then recently published encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae.

 

In the first place, Rahner points out that Human Life cannot reasonably be considered irreformable doctrine. But this does not mean that it may be ignored. Since Catholics believe that the magisterium ordinarily operates under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the presumption should be in favor of the Pope’s declaration. Any such presumption, however, must also allow of the possibility that a Catholic can arrive at a carefully formed and critically tested conviction that in a given case the fallible magisterium has in fact erred. 

Nobody today denies that there are cases in which official, reformable teaching of the Holy See has in fact been erroneous. As examples, Rahner cites the views of Gregory XVI and Pius IX on liberal democracy, and various statements about the Bible issued in the aftermath of the Modernist crisis. It cannot therefore be assumed that a Catholic who conscientiously opposes the non-infallible doctrine of the magisterium, as it stands at a given moment, is necessarily disloyal.

 (In this connection an American Catholic might think of the long struggle of John Courtney Murray to obtain revision of certain papal pronouncements on Church-State relations.) In the present case, Rahner continues, the complexity of the issue is such that no one opposed to the encyclical can claim absolute certainty for his own stand. But it is normal and inevitable that some should be unable to accept the pope’s doctrine. The encyclical, although it claims to be an interpretation of the natural law, does not in fact give very persuasive intrinsic arguments. The encyclical seems to look on human nature as something static and closed–not open to modification by free and responsible human decision. But for some time many moral theologians have been teaching that what is distinctive to human nature, as distinct from plant and animal life, is precisely man’s power to modify his own nature according to the demands of a higher good. The pope, in fact, seems to allow for a measure of rational manipulation of human fertility in permitting the practice of rhythm and the use of the “pill” to regularize the menstrual cycle. Undoubtedly this differs somewhat from the use of the pill for directly contraceptive purposes, but in some instances the distinction is so subtle that many will regard it as hair-splitting. Since a notable majority of the Papal Commission is known to have come out against the position later taken in the encyclical, one can hardly expect the majority of Catholics to find the reasoning of Human Life convincing. 

Link (here) to the Monk's Hobbit

Woozle And The Fish

Luise "Woozle" Rinser

It is an image out of sync with the persona of a German academic: Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner on his knees before a woman, overwhelmed with gratitude for his love, for a passionate relationship with a 51-year-old widow and two-time divorcee that would produce some 4,000 letters between 1962 and Rahner's death in 1984. Rahner, considered by many to be the 20th century's most creative Catholic theologian, was 58 when German novelist Luise Rinser played the image back to him in a letter dated Aug. 10, 1962. "My Fish, truly beloved, I cannot express how shaken I was as you knelt before me," she wrote. "You were kneeling before the Love that you are experiencing and before which I also kneel in amazement, in reverence, with trembling and with an exultation that I hardly dare to allow myself to feel. We are both touched in the innermost part of our being by something that is much stronger than we anticipated."

The passage is from letters that Rinser wrote to Rahner over the 22 years of their relationship. Published in German, the letters hold a particular fascination for Pamela Kirk, a theologian who teaches at St. John's University in Jamaica, N.Y. While there has been virtually no public discussion of the letters in the United States, she has delivered two papers on the Rinser-Rahner relationship at the Catholic Theological Society of America.

As the relationship progressed, Rahner was petulant, reproachful, wanting greater loyalty from Rinser, who warned him that another man, a Benedictine abbot and her spiritual director, took priority over Rahner in her affections. All three parties to this apparently celibate love triangle -- Rinser, Rahner and "M.A.," as she refers to the abbot, connected at Rinser's second home near Rome during the Second Vatican Council. The abbot was a council participant, Rahner a theological adviser, Rinser correspondent for a German Catholic newspaper. At times during their 22-year relationship, Rahner wrote Rinser three or four letters a day. The couple called each other by nicknames: hers "Wuhschel," the German rendering for the Woozle character in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh (a nickname first given to Rinser by her two sons); his "Fish" for its double meaning: symbol of Christianity and Pisces, the sign Rahner was born under on March 5, 1904.

Fr. Karl "Fish" Rahner, S.J.

Link (here) to National Catholic Reporter

Karl Rahner, S.J, On The Issue Of The "Unchangeable" Teachings

In 1948-9 Karl Rahner, S.J. returned to the theology faculty at Innsbruck and taught on a wide variety of topics which were to become the essays published in Schriften zur Theologie (Theological Investigations). The Investigations is not a systematic presentation of Rahner’s views, but, rather, is a diverse collection of essays on theological topics characterized by his probing, questioning search for truth. 

Rahner was to develop difficulties with Rome. His outspoken, frank approach to issues and his creative, challenging and non-traditional approach to theology often got him into trouble with the authorities who tended to be more traditionally minded, especially on the issue of the "unchangeable" teachings of the Catholic Church. 

In 1962, however, with no prior warning Rahner’s superiors in the Order told him that he was under Roman pre-censorship, which meant that he could not publish or lecture without prior permission. The basic objections of the Roman authorities focused, essentially, on Rahner’s views on the eucharist and Mariology.

Link (here) to the Boston University website

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J. Sides With The Scotists Against The Thomists

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

What he called "Hypostatic Union" is, therefore, central in his thinking, for he would believe that the ultimate purpose of all theology must serve to break down the wall between God and man through the hypostatic union, that is, the union of (hypostases of) God and man. Thus, hypostatic union is not unique or special only in Jesus but it is general in the sense that it could and should happen to all the human beings. Jesus opened up this human possibility in total obedience to God. If hypostatic union which had finally happened in Christ's incarnation should be the ultimate purpose of man in general, incarnation and creation are inseparable in their purpose. And if creation without incarnation is impossible, incarnation must be a predestined necessity regardless of the Fall. In this aspect, as Robert Kress correctly pointed out,  

"Rahner sides with the Scotists against the Thomists in the dispute about the precise motive of the incarnation. For the Thomist school of theology the Word would not have become flesh had Adam not sinned. For the Scotist school the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned." 

It implies that Christ's incarnation was his destiny and necessity, not his free choice or decision due to the human fallenness and gracious love as traditional theology has believed. 

Link (here) to the full article entitled, Karl Rahner's Philosophical Understanding of the Trinity

The Olden Days

Johann Baptist Metz (pictured), Rahner’s student and friend, wrote that by the time Rahner died, “he had become probably the most influential and important Catholic thinker of his day.”

A priest from the southwestern U.S. said that of his 1970s seminary training, “Everything was Rahner; Rahner was in; Aquinas was out.” 

Metz said elsewhere, “Karl Rahner has renewed the face of our theology. Nothing is quite as it was before.”

Link (here) to the full article by John Vennari, entitled Karl Rahner's Girlfriend

Regret Or Admire?

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

Jesuit Karl Rahner used to speak of people in non-Western countries who somehow live Christ-like lives as “anonymous Christians.” Now we have explicitly Christian aid workers exercising their discipleship anonymously, rather than in the name of Christ. Should we regret this or admire it?

Link (here) to read a rather lengthy piece at Religion Dispatches. 

 

Rahner's theology dominated the seminaries. Moreover, through his chief theological disciple, Johannes Baptist Metz, Rahner was the grandfather (if not always the happy grandfather) of the theologies of liberation. Further, 20 years of mission theory bear the imprint of Rahner's argument that all people of good will and moral earnestness are, in some sense, "anonymous Christians."

Link (here) to a great article dissecting Fr. Rahner's theology at Catholic Culture. 

Weigal On Rahner

An influential idea advanced by the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and his student Johannes Metz, is that non-Christians who live a morally decent life could be saved by the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus even if they'd never even heard of Christianity. I'm tutored on this concept by my friend George Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II. (You might want to read Weigel's article, ''The Century After Rahner,'' in the Library of Catholic Culture online.

''At one level, the notion of 'anonymous Christianity' was simply the ancient Christian recognition that 'there are many whom Christ has that the Church does not have' -- though all who are saved, even outside the formal boundaries of the Church, are saved through Christ,'' Weigel notes.

My favorite statement of this impulse is from the 1965 statement promulgated by Pope Paul VI at the end of Vatican II: ''Since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is, in fact, one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.''

....Weigel.....(states) that Rahner's idea of anonymous Christianity can't be pushed too far. When all is said and done, Christianity simply cannot accept interfaith dialogue disconnected from its understanding of the truth of the Christian claim. In addition to respectful and humble dialogue with non-Christians, there must always be an evangelizing element seeking the conversion of the partner in dialogue to what Christians believe is a truer vision of God's way with us in the world.

Link (here)

More on Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J. (here)

Science, Don't Get Christianity Either.

Intelligent Design People Don't Get Theology, Either
If the theory of evolution only appeared formally and scientifically with Darwin in the 19th century, and famously continues to evolve with burgeoning discoveries and nuances in our own time (the New York Times featured an entire section dedicated to the pullulating perspectives of evolutionary theory on June 28, 2007), perhaps religion can be forgiven a certain tardiness in catching up to the swiftly accumulating evidence. To be sure, St. Augustine already had a seminal theory of seminal causes within the potency of matter in the early fifth century. Also, Pope Pius XII already stamped his basic approval on the theory in his encyclical Humani Generis in 1951. Nonetheless, events like the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925 did not put an end to the furor in evangelical religious circles, which continues unabated and debated today regarding "intelligent design" in school teaching. In any case, the subject of evolution has always awed and fascinated me—even though I played the opposition (i.e., Matthew Harrison Brady) in Inherit the Wind as a young Jesuit! In modern times, the famous French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was the most passionate proponent of evolution in Catholic circles. He was a paleontologist and mystic/poet who saw the entire universe as striving towards ever-greater "complexity-consciousness," and thus ultimately toward its fulfillment in and through Christ, whom he termed the "Omega Point." It is an enthralling vision, although both scientists and theologians complained that he tended not to respect the methodologies of their disciplines (for more on this read my initial blog entry on this topic). Hence, his fellow Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote to vindicate him in more formal theological language in his Theological Investigations. Basically, Rahner sees matter as guided upward and outward by the creative impulse of what Christians term the Holy Spirit, who is Creator not just at some hypothetical moment of creation, but necessarily present in creation at every moment with a vivifying and ever-expansive action. Such a dynamic perspective makes God's creative involvement all the more majestic, magnificent, and personal, stretching over millions, and indeed billions of years, even as, for God, "a thousand years are like a watch in the night." Here we are very far indeed from a "watchmaker" that winds up the universe, and then goes his way, as the Deists tended to argue. Yet we are also very far from a literalism that, as Rahner remarks, does not in fact take the texts literally, but actually misreads them. For, the first chapters of the Book of Genesis were never meant to be taken as history or science, as "eyewitness" accounts, either of God or of someone impossibly "interviewing" God, but as a spiritual, theological, and mystical statement about God's relationship with the world; as an "aetiological myth," to use Rahner's phrase, that provides an explanation, based on the human author's contemporary experience, of how things must have gotten to be the way we see them. The "seven days" are not seven days (how could there be a "day" before the fourth "day" when the sun was created? So asks Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind), but stages to show how creation splendidly unfolds, directly related to God in all its panoply and detail. Of course, we must also avoid the facile and misguided efforts to find correspondences between the "days" and scientific geological ages. On the contrary, modern scriptural scholarship confirms what the Kabbalah intuited centuries ago—i.e., this first chapter of Genesis has a different source from the second.
More specifically, it is a later priestly source, whose concern was to ground the sabbath and the seven-day week in some kind of primordial validating event. In other words, God's creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh is not the source of the sabbath observance; it is the other way around.
What I would like to suggest, however, is that mature theology is also very far from intelligent design, which I consider to be a particularly unfortunate, maladroit, and problematic notion, at least as it is commonly presented and understood. It is true that the fifth argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is based on the design and governance of the universe. Yet theologians themselves noted, long before Richard Dawkins, that the argument is hardly cogent, and probably better serves as a reflection (in a double sense) of faith by believers than as an effort to persuade unbelievers. In addition, according with Stephen Jay Gould's insistence on the paramount role of chance in evolution, a priest friend of mine often takes the case a seemingly irreverent step further: with all the chance, chaos, entropy, violence, waste, injustice, and randomness in the universe, the project hardly seems very intelligent! Do we imagine that God is intelligent in basically the same way that we are, just a very BIG intelligence and "super-smart"? And "design," once again, evokes the watchmaker who somehow stands outside the universe, tinkering with his schemes at some cosmic drawing board. How could God be outside of anything or stand anywhere, or take time to design anything? Read the full blog post on MSM's Discover Magazine (here)

.

Note the following about this blog post:

The author quotes a rogue theologian whose writing have been banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Karl Rahner was never considered a scientist and his theological insights have a lot to be desired (sorry Rahner fans). When you want to know the position of the Roman Catholic Church quote the Holy Father's Benedict and John Paul II. For Pete's sake at least quote the Catechism! By the way, why does the author compare evangelicals with Catholic's?

Real Catholic takes on creation, (here), (here) and (here)

Planets

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

Karl Rahner lived on two different planets. Yet the Jesuit theologian’s analysis was virtually identical. “We are at the beginning of the little flock,” Rahner said in his book The Shape of the Church to Come (Crossroad), published around the same time. Rahner, however, adds a crucial warning. The “little flock” does not mean “little sect.” The little flock is called to profess the Christian faith and the cross, not to defend “cozy traditionalism and stale pseudo-orthodoxy,” not to live “in fear of modern society.”

Link (here) to the US Catholic

Radical New Interpretation Of St. Thomas Aquinas

"holed up in the Vatican armed with some Swiss Guard halberds to await the coming collapse of the modern world."

Further to the right are the fundamentalist vigilantes who each week fill the pages of the National Catholic Register with field reports on what they call the “guerrilla warfare” that faithless liberal theologians are waging against the Pope—the fifth column theory. Then there are those who denounce the treacherous betrayal of the Church by none other than the Pope himself, Paul VI, who intentionally let communist moles into the Vatican—the Antichrist theory popularized by the former Jesuit Malachi Martin. These Catholic survivalists seem to believe they have no choice but to hole up in the Vatican armed with some Swiss Guard halberds to await the coming collapse of the modern world.¹ 

 What separates Karl Rahner from even the most intelligent of conservative Catholic theologians and what makes his thought so radically innovative lies not primarily in his theology but in his philosophy, the theory of knowledge and being that he forged in the Thirties while studying under Martin Heidegger. In the spring of 1934, just two years after becoming a Jesuit priest, Rahner registered for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, and over the next four semesters he attended virtually every lecture course and seminar that Heidegger gave. He was in the classroom when Heidegger echoed Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses” and when he asserted that “a faith that does not constantly expose itself to the possibility of unfaith is no faith at all but a mere convenience.” The effect of Heidegger’s teaching was overwhelming. Thirty years later Rahner would remark that “although I had many good professors in the classroom, there is only one whom I can revere as my teacher, and he is Martin Heidegger.” 

The experience proved to be an academic disaster for Rahner. In the spring of 1936 he presented as his doctoral dissertation a radical new interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the viewpoint of Heidegger—and he was promptly flunked by the conservative Thomistic philosopher, Martin Honecker, who was his dissertation director. Rahner withdrew from philosophy and eventually took his PhD in theology. Nonetheless the would-be dissertation was published in 1939 as Geist in Welt (Spirit in the World) and was immediately and immensely successful. The book reshaped the foundations of the Thomistic theory of knowledge and being, and it provided the groundwork—as much Heideggerian as Thomistic—for the new theology that Rahner has continued to pour forth since the end of World War II. ²

Link (here) to read the full article at NYBooks

Deacon Scott Dodge, On Rahner With Sts. Aquinas and Augustine

In Philosophy, even in this day an age, one is, at least to some degree, either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. So, in Christian theology even now, one is either primarily an Augustinian or a Thomist. Of course, the Plato/Aristotle distinction is operative in the Augustinian/Thomist dichotomy; with Augustine being the Platonist and Thomas the Aristotelian. Perhaps what distinguishes Pope Benedict XVI and his dear friend, whose closest collaborator he was, Pope John Paul II, is that John Paul had a primarily Thomistic outlook, while Benedict is an Augustinian through-and-through. One of the issues most central to this theological split is anthropology, the nature and orientation of the human person. Jesuit theologian,

Fr. Karl Rahner, was a Thomist. In fact, he called his theological method
"transcendental Thomism." In his CT article, Williams writes of Rahner's
theological anthropology, that he "held that human beings have a fundamental
orientation toward goodness, truth, and love, and that at the soul's bottom
there exists an orientation toward God." For Rahner, according to Williams,
"people merely have to be reminded of the good, and they will seek
it."Augustinians, such as myself, while not necessarily dismissing the
fundamental goodness at the bottom of the human soul, see that people do not
always seem to be oriented toward the good, toward God."

Some Augustinians, Calvinists, to take but one example, argue for the total depravity of the unredeemed human soul. It is not too much to insist that the facts on the ground often seem to support this thesis. Human history shows us, Williams observes, that "letting humanity choose whatever works to its own advantage results in the primacy of self-interest and personal gain." Further, unless we are obliged "as well as enabled to see what is good, [we] will not freely choose it, because it will not immediately seem to be in [our] self interest."

Read the Deacon's full blog post (here)

But then again, "Can you trust anything that Rahner says, in the light of this."

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J., " Happy 75th Birthday Martin Heidegger"

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J. sends a "Happy Birthday" message to his former philosophy professor and NAZI sympathizer Martin Heidegger. Listen to it in German (here)

Avant Garde Statement

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J

Catholic theologians of note were making statements that went far beyond anything said in the aula of St. Peter’s. Fr. Jean Danielou, S.J., expressed himself as being in favor of the ordination of deaconesses “without delay and therefore before the end of the Council.” Avant garde as his statement may seem, it was not made in a theological vacuum. In 1962 Fr. Haye van der Meer, S.J., with Fr. Karl Rahner as his mentor, completed a doctoral thesis at Innsbruck titled “Theologische Uberlegungen uber die Thesis: subiectum ordinationis solus est mas” (“Theological Reflections on the Thesis: the male alone is fit for ordination”). The author considers the usual arguments for excluding women from ordination — arguments from Scripture and traditional theology — and concludes that there is no valid reason for continuing the exclusion. Moreover, he claims that Canon 968, Section 1, limiting ordination to a vir baptizatus, requires clarification. The canon has ordinarily been interpreted as forbidding the ordination of women, but it seems more likely that what it forbids is the ordination of non-baptizatus. Thus ordination of a femina baptizata was never contemplated by the framers of the canon; so they could scarcely have intended to legislate against it.

At about the same time that Fr. van der Meer was working on his dissertation in Innsbruck another Jesuit, Jose Idigoras, was pursuing a similar investigation at the Catholic University in Lima, Peru. Adapted excerpts from his doctoral thesis, “La Mujer dentro del Orden Sagrado” (“Woman in Relation to Holy Ordination”), were printed in the widely circulated Informations Catholiques Internationales in 1963 and 1965. Idigoras also examines the usual antifeminine arguments and, like van der Meer, concludes that the church not only may but must admit women to orders if it is to be true to the gospel and to St. Paul’s obviously doctrinal statement (opposed to the discriminatory disciplinary statements) that in Christ “there is neither male or female” (Gal. 3:28).

A North American, Fr. Charles R. Meyer of the Mundelein seminary faculty in the Chicago archdiocese, takes up in an article in a recent issue of Chicago Studies (excerpted in the popular Catholic Digest) the problem of whether, as Fr. Idigoras claims, some of St. Paul’s female assistants were genuinely ordained deaconesses — a problem which is crucial, since the Catholic Church regards admission to the diaconate as so related to ordination that women could not be capable of the diaconate unless they were also capable of the priesthood. Fr. Meyer’s study concludes:

We must, I think . . . admit that the theologians and canonists of our time have been . . . guilty of some dishonesty in treating the question of the ordination of women in the early Church. In their treatises on the matter there seems to be a selective presentation of the facts, if indeed any attempt at all is made to do other than merely repeat what their predecessors have said. . . . But the time for complete honesty is at hand . . . now theologians must make a careful and unprejudiced re-examination of the whole question. This is the least they can do.

Other theologians who have discussed this problem publicly are Fr. Hans Kung and Fr. George H. Tavard, who have said that they know of no valid theological objection to the ordination of women.

Link (here) to Womanpriests

Cardinal George Pell On Jesuit Karl Rahner

God's love cures suffering
By Cardinal George Pell
February 03, 2008
IN Australia we don't hear as much about Pope Benedict as we used to hear about Pope John Paul. Therefore, it is a surprise to learn that larger crowds come to Rome for Pope Benedict's audiences than his predecessor attracted.

The Pope spent his earlier life as a professional theologian in German universities and the Roman Curia. Catholic and Protestant theology in Germany is high powered and often dense. The Jesuit Karl Rahner was one of the most influential theologians of the last century, and his brother, Hugo, also a theologian, once quipped that he waited for his brother's works to be translated into English so he could understand them!

Pope Benedict can regularly escape from this world. Just before Christmas, the Pope issued his second encyclical (or letter) on the virtue of hope, to follow his first one on love. This is not an easy read, but I bought half a dozen copies to give to friends; something I haven't done with a papal letter for many years.

Adult Christians do not have inflated expectations about the goodness of human nature, as they believe in original sin, that primeval flaw in human hearts. But Christians, who believe a good God is ultimately in charge, are hopeful, not cynics, constrained to avoid the ultimate questions about happiness and suffering, life and death. This Pope's short work explains the true shape of Christian hope and its essential link to faith as explained by Jesus and the New Testament writers. This hope is life-changing and life sustaining.

Many unbelievers, as distinct from doubters, reject the claim that there is an afterlife and, especially, that the one true God will judge each of us. The Pope confronts both these problems. He acknowledges that more of the same after death can appear like a curse rather than a gift: endless, monotonous and ultimately unbearable. We don't know much about the blessed life of heaven, except that it won't be a succession of days, but like plunging into an ocean of infinite love, where time no longer exists. The Pope also insists that the need for justice is the strongest argument for faith in eternal life. The image of the Last Judgment is not an image of unreasonable terror, but an image of the one merciful God creating justice, where the differences between criminals and victims are not ignored, but all those with good will are purified as the scales of justice are balanced. The faith in scientific and political progress which sustained unbelievers for the last 200 years has stalled, killed off especially by the communists and the Nazis. The Pope is claiming that only God can create justice, that only God's love can cure centuries of suffering. A world condemned to create its own justice is a world without hope.
Cardinal Pell is Australia's most senior Catholic cleric.

Link (here)

Jesuits On Their Society And The Holy Father

Fr. Richard John Nuehaus quotes Fr. Paul Shaughnessy, S.J. and Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner from his article entitled, The Catholic Center.

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Remember, for instance, how the Jesuits were once noted for their fierce loyalty to the papacy. They are still loyal, but with a futurist twist of discontinuant devising. Thus the very influential Karl Rahner, in one of his less judicious moments, told his fellow Jesuits: “

You must remain loyal to the papacy in theology and in practice, because that is part of your heritage to a special degree, but because the actual form of the papacy remains subject, in the future too, to an historical process of change, your theology and ecclesiastical law has above all to serve the papacy as it will be in the future.”

Jesuit Paul Shaughnessy comments:

“Jesuits are all loyal to the papacy, but to the future papacy-that of Pope Chelsea XII, perhaps-and their support for contraception, gay sex, and divorce proceeds from humble obedience to this conveniently protean pontiff.”

Shaughnessy goes too far, of course. There are still some admirably loyal Jesuits. But you see the move. As with the above-mentioned bishop, all things are permitted when one is a “forerunner of the Church of tomorrow.” Being a faithful Catholic is becoming now what Catholic will mean when faithfulness is redefined. Liberated by “the spirit of Vatican II” from past and present, discontinuants of the left hold themselves rigorously accountable to a future of their own desiring.

Link (here)

Former Jesuit Paul Lakeland On Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

The barrage of conservative pressure that you have had to face in recent weeks comes from people who wish to turn back the clock on church-state relations to a time before Vatican II, when the Church did what it could to impose its Catholic vision upon the constitutional systems of secular states. Fifty years ago the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called this “the heresy of integrism.” It rears its ugly head wherever anyone attempts to take Catholic teaching and use it as a template for the ethical or legal system of a pluralistic society. It is vitally important to distinguish between the right to hold our views and the right to impose them on others, and I am afraid that the likes of the Cardinal Newman Society simply do not understand this.

Link (here) to The Cardinal Newman Society read more of Paul Lakeland's statement.

My Beloved Fish And Wuschel

Karl Rahner, S.J. said that he wanted to be “faithful” to his vow of celibacy, but this did not prevent his kneeling before her in a protestation of love. Luise Rinser speaks of the incident in a letter to him dated August 12, 1962.

“My fish, truly beloved,” she writes, “I cannot express how shaken I was as you knelt before me. You were kneeling before the Love that you are experiencing and before which I also kneel in amazement, in reverence, with trembling and with an exultation that I hardly dare to allow myself to feel. We are both touched in the innermost part of our being by something that is much stronger than we anticipated.”

Rinser and the Jesuit priest employed pet names for each other. Rahner called her Wushcel, the German rendering for the Woozel character in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (a nickname first given to Rinser by her two sons). She called him “my beloved Fish,” a reminder of the ancient Christian symbol, and a nod to his Zodiac sign of Pisces.

Link (here) to a much larger piece at The Catholic Vox

This Is Not Rahner’s "World Church"

Pope Benedict is preeminently the Pope of Christian Unity. Pope Benedict has been struggling against forces within his own fold to achieve Christian unity.

His is decidedly not the unity that liberals (Richard McBrien, Gerald O’Collins) have in mind when they think of Christian unity, with its watered-down version of Roman primacy, liturgy, catechesis, sexual ethics and church discipline. In other words, a Christian unity without a Christian identity (christian with a small ‘c’).

No, Benedict’s unity is real unity, true unity that costs something, that stretches people, but that does not compromise what is essential to the Church.

This is not Karl Rahner’s "world church" where anything and anyone goes. It is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by Christ Jesus.

Benedict’s true ecumenism is consonant with everything we are as a Church. People are going to be stretched, but absolutely nothing essential will be given away. You see where I am going with this. Liberals want ecumenism only with those whom they want in their sort of church.

Link (here) to the full post by Fr. Z.