This text is an essay from Istvan Bibo (famous hungarian lawyer, civil servant, liberal-socialist politician and political theorist...and a firm beliver in "az írástudók kötelessége" - burden of the literate"). The text is very famous, but not so knowledged in Hungary...
Warning: this is not a professional translation. (from public domain source)
IF THE GOSPIN MOVEMENT WON IN THE 15TH CENTURY
Conversations of István Bibó, honorary canons of Vác, with his father-in-law, Archbishop László Ravasz, on the modern history of the Roman Catholic Church, with special regard to the Lutheran and Calvinist congregations.
{4-267} Toynbee says somewhere that if a synod movement close enough to victory at the moment in the 15th century wins, the history of all of Christianity and Europe will be different, and in all likelihood the Reformation would have failed in its divisive form. This remark was inspired by the dialogic uchrony outlined below (= reviving non-existent time series, utopias about non-existent places).model of what would have happened if the synod movement had won: the point of the idea is that in the 16th century a Catholic-Protestant-Erasmian compromise would save the unity of the Church, the constitutional movements that break the attempts at princely absolutism in the covenant of the Church, so that the interplay of enlightened absolutism falls short, and modern freedoms continue to grow organically from medieval freedoms, as in England. Thus the Church remains the framework of all European spiritual life, the Enlightenment, modern science, humanism, democracy, liberalism, socialism all take place within the framework of the Christian Church,
I note that uchrony is much less written than a utopia: there is a French author, simply entitled “Uchronia,” which is interestingly also religious in nature, but which is not based on a possibility that has actually arisen, but on a completely fictional historical turn,{4-268}according to which Kr. u. in the 2nd century, a certain letter from Cassius regenerates the whole ancient worldview, so that Europe does not become a Christian, and the ancient world passes into the world of modern enlightenment and freedom without significant interlude in the dark Christian Middle Ages. Needless to say, this whole idea is utterly unrealistic, because ancient slave “democracy” could never have transitioned to modern democracy based on the equal human dignity of all people without Christian interludes, nor the impartial, almost playfully curious nature of antiquity. without asceticism, it would not have been able to transition to modern, strictly exact science, nor would it have been possible to create a modern,
The protagonists of the dialogue are László Ravasz, Cardinal Archbishop of Pest, and István Bibó, honorary canons of Vác. It begins in 1963, when RL is just arriving from Rome for the last papal election, where Cardinal Montini was finally elected over his most likely opponent, Cardinal Vissert'Hooft, general of the Calvinist Congregation. BI, on the other hand, comes from Márianosztra, where he was treated for six years in Hungary's oldest medical institution, founded by Lajos Nagy, which he praises for its good care and administration, but complains about the inadequate and crude treatment of merciful doctors and nurses. RL reports on the debates and problems of the Constituent Assembly and the papal election since 1962. The Church is currently thrilled by two major opposites: the question of socialism and the question of free thinking. On both issues, there is a reformist wing that wants to see these trends as an integral part of Christian thought, and a conservative wing that wants to expel them from the community of the Church, even at the cost of a rift. Last seen in the 16th century{4-269}there was such a close danger of secession when, as a result of the combined efforts of Cardinal Erasmus, Cardinal Contarini and Cardinal Melanchton, the Church embraced the new secular orders, the Lutheran congregation founded by St. Martin Luther in Also the Calvinist Congregation founded by St. John. All this would not have been possible if the process of the Church's constitutional organization had not begun in the wake of the victorious Basel Council in the 15th century, and the universal and national councils, which were becoming more and more permanent institutions, for adoption. The heavier nut was, of course, swallowed by the Calvinists: since we know there was a moment, when St. John Calvin was rescued from excommunication and condemnation only by the president of the Sacra Rota, Cardinally old Cardinal Savonarola, who sympathized not so much with Calvin's theological views — of whom he did not understand much — as with a moral like my Florentine rule Calvin is furnished in Geneva. (It was Cardinal Savonarola who, at the time, passed the deprivation of the scandalous Cardinal Borgia from the cardinal's hat as a unique occasion!) The struggle between the two congregations lasted for two hundred years, until finally in the 18th century, when a strongly revolutionary Franciscan-Calvinist coalition ruled the Church, the Jesuit order was dissolved. So far, following the agitation of Cardinal Locke, Cardinal Montesquieu, and Abbot Rousseau, it has also matured to apply the program of ecclesiastical constitutionality to secular power. The Church, which has the support of universal and national councils, has been sharply opposed to the Anglican, Gallic, and Josephine attempts of state omnipotence since the 16th century,{4-270}however, he now realized that these aspirations would gain much more momentum if the Church combined the protection of its own rights with the protection of the rights of the people. Thus, with the full support of the Church, the French Revolution, led by Bishop Mirabeau and the canons of Danton, began. Louis was given an attempt by a Josephine-absolutist to articulate the civil constitution of the priesthood. It is true that Robespierre's reign of terror and the reaction to it made the church a little more cautious, but by the middle of the 19th century, the revolutions of 1848 had broken the remnants of princely absolutism all over Europe and Russia without power. the kings. However, the form of state at the heart of the Church has long been a republic, and the two leading countries of Christian liberty and social and economic progress were the two European republics, the Italian Federal Republic under the Pope and the Dutch Federal Republic. In the momentum of the 48 revolutions, the extreme left wing of the revolution, the beginning of socialism, was also under the protection of the papacy: the proclamation-like voice of the “Spectrum pervadit Europam,” which, for the first time since previous cautious experiments, Rerum Novarum in 1788, and Quadragesimo Anno in 1828, consistently articulated the Christian requirements of a just and modern social order. However, the socialist revolution, even more so, like the democratic revolution that preceded it, it raised the temptation for the Church itself, the bearer of the ideology of social transformation, to become a part of, and even a bearer of, political power in connection with the revolutionary transformation. However, since the 18th century, Christian thought has become increasingly important, especially in the wake of Voltaire's agitation.{4-271} He recognized that not only the ecclesiastical preponderance of secular power was dangerous, but also the secular preponderance of ecclesiastical power. Then, when the troops of the Italian Federal Republic under the Pope, led by Pope General Garibaldi, overthrew the Savoy House, the last obstacle to Italian unity, and the last monarchy from Italy, the pope's role in this last European war caused a great deal of moral crisis. throughout Christianity. This prompted the papacy to announce at the Vatican Council in 1870 the voluntary abolition of all secular power of the papacy, including the presidency of the Italian Federal Republic. (The same council finally clarified the long-standing issue of the pope’s infallibility, separating the politicalinfallibility of the Pope as the constitutional ruler of the Synod, who “cannot do evil” andinfallibility, which does not belong to the Pope in person, but to the Church as a whole, and essentially not to the infallibility of certain resolutions, but to the fact that the Holy Spirit as a whole does not leave the Church under any circumstances.) In the 20th century, though quite elsewhere, in Russia, where the Church finally succeeded in overthrowing the absolute monarchy. Soon, however, a situation arose in which the Russian Church also considered itself forced to take over secular power, and first Patriarch Cardinal Ulyanov and then Cardinal Patriarch Jugashvili came to power. From the first minute, Rome opposed the unification of ecclesiastical and state power in one hand, the enactment of the leading role of the Church and the resulting theocratic rule, for he feared, on the one hand, the consequences of the concentration of power for the freedom and, on the other, the possibility of the Church being discredited. However, in the international response to these developments, concerns about the issue of freedom are inextricably linked.{4-272}confused with the bourgeois-capitalist opposition to socialism. That was the stumbling block. which transferred the Calvinist congregation from its former revolutionary position to the camp of heavily rigid conservatism, in which it increasingly identified the cause of freedom with its bourgeois-capitalist forms. Thus, the Calvinists became the main movers in the so-called synagogue of the Cold War, which paralyzed the functioning of the synod for years, because the Russian church responded to the permanent vote with a permanent obstruction, and the danger of the rupture of the church reappeared seriously on the horizon. The situation changed when, after Dzhugashvili's death, Rome succeeded in persuading Cardinal Khrushchev to openly expose the excesses of power that had proliferated under his predecessor. And now there is serious hope that that the final separation of the main ecclesiastical and state functions in Russia will also succeed. In this atmosphere, the conservative coalition that ruled the church in the 1950s became more and more fragmented, so that in the 1963 papal elections, the Benedictines, Cistercians and Dominicans alike faced Vissert'Hooft, the Pálvin the spiritual father of the Cold War, the deceased Cardinal Dulles. In the new ecclesiastical governing coalition, the compromise-seeking Lutherans, the Jesuits who are slowly shifting from the center to the left and masterfully using the tools of mass psychology, and the long-left Franciscans will take the lead. Thus, in RL's view, there will be no prospect of a Calvinist pope for a long time, which he regrets, but hopes
{4-273}However, RL also says that the new ecclesiastical government, while taking the position of “opening to the left” on political issues, is more of a “Roman” trend on other issues, such as priestly infertility, virginity, and birth control. This trend, despite the fact that the Church acknowledged priestly marriage in the 16th century to demand the two Protestant congregations and all non-violent means of birth control in the 19th century to demand feminist nun orders, still favors women in high ecclesiastical offices. and widows (the majority of which is still made up of cardinals), seeks to confine and oppose cases of moral justification for birth control, given the very strong cult of Mary in the southern countries,
The dialogue then moves on to another major issue occupying the Synod, the issue of Christian free thinking. RL takes a moderate but modern position on the previous problem, while he is more conservative than neo-orthodox on BI on the issue of free thinking. He explains that Cardinal Bertrand Russell, the leader of the Free Congregation for the Modern Congregation of Scientists, explained at the Synod that the withdrawal of freethinkers from the Church could only be prevented by a clear and resolute synod resolution that would finally openly state what the One tacitly tolerate that ye. possible believing Christianity without any miracle faith (including the faith of Jesus ’bodily resurrection) and without any theological dogma faith. Refers to{4-274} prevented the separation of the Church by recognizing that the unity of the Church was confined to one Latitude,it is able to maintain a position that allows for multiple views, which leaves the clarification of questions to the longer-term work of the Holy Spirit. This behavior was later proven, e.g. in matters of Copernican worldview and Darwinism. The synod finally ended up with a cautious, compromise resolution that referred the issue to individual conscience without clear exposure. Although Cardinal Russell allowed himself to be discouraged from the radical rupture, he doubted in private whether he had done the right thing when he had founded the Congregation of Scientists with metaphysical scientists such as the prosperous Cardinal Teilhard du Chardin, and whether it was right. to write his famous pamphlet, Why I Am a Christian .
BI regrets the brutal resolution of the synod, which RL endorses. BI goes into this personal attack and rebukes RL for not preaching Christian free-thinking frontally in his preaching, but never giving a clear excuse for not believing in Christian free-thinking, and for all miracles and theological items of a metaphysical nature, always in strictly traditional phraseology. he suggested that he should not cause outrage, even for the most limited fundamentalists, although it is common knowledge that not only was he not a fundamentalist, but the modern biblical approach that followed Cardinal Harnack at the time had a significant shaping effect on him. RL explains that in his pedagogical work he never left the slightest doubt that he was not a fundamentalist, that he does not regard miracle faith as an essential element of the Christian faith, and considers himself to be the Church's teaching that dogmas are not absolute but human formulations of truths beyond human formability. He believes{4-275} , however, is a different thing about theological education, and a different thing about preaching. It’s not like he wants to introduce some kind of enlightenment reserved for clergy alone. But because preaching is not a resolution between theories , but a transmission of the message of the crucified Christ, there is no place here to confuse believers and distract them from the essence: what is right in Christian free thought is not for believers. by communicating free-thinking itemscan be conveyed, but by a preaching bringing Christ closer, which, precisely because of this closeness, without any special emphasis and wisdom, makes the primitive miracle of faith and theological dogmatism superfluous. He who cannot bring Christ closer than the traditional preaching has no right to confuse believers with the conspiracy-seeking advertising of free-thinking items, and possibly even to remove them. He, for his part, does not feel entitled to do so, and sees in the dubious and permissive preaching of many fashionable modern priests more conspicuous itching than preaching. BI acknowledges all of this, but points to the danger of free thinking being isolated in the Church, but great revivals are taking on obscurant spiritual forms over and over again.
The re-emergence of the Jewish question is also related to the issue of free thinking. Since the 18th century, the Church has unequivocally condemned all forms of anti-Semitism, hostile attitudes toward Jews, as evidenced by Bishop Zola's fight for the truth of Captain Dreyfus, who was persecuted for his Jewish origins. In the 20th century, however, the question arose in a new aspect: a trend in Christian free thinking, in agreement with Jewish free thinkers, aimed at relativizing the difference between Christianity and Judaism and reuniting the two religions in the Ten Commandments.{4-276} as a common moral foundation. From the beginning, RL was sharply opposed to any position that would try to gray out Christ's one-time and most personal message into a set of somewhat uncharacteristically general moral rules, and thus has taken and continues to take a strong stand against Christian-Jewish syncretism. Looking back today, he believes that in the heat of the polemic, many resolutions have been made on his part that are sharper than necessary, but his anger is not against Judaism and the Jews, but against dissolving the Christian teaching, and it is still directed today. However, it is a cause of deep shock for all of us that in the second quarter of the 20th century, socialunprecedented and unexpected resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and regular pogroms in Germany, in which five or even six million, so these events make the deep truth of the mountain discourse relevant to all of us, which, although not in this formulation, is nevertheless in the sense that you are. he who is angry with his neighbor has already killed him in his heart.
The debate usually deals with the crises of the Church, and it is concluded that, after all, neither socialism nor free thinking will lead to a crisis, as it did not lead to the greatest crisis in the 16th century, which is closest. was to him. The question arises as to whether, in the 16th century, when all common sense was much more in favor of the rift than against it, how it was finally remedied. RL points to the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit that enabled the collaboration and successful joint action of the three great Erasmusic cardinals. BI, on the other hand, argues with a more ground - breaking argument that it is. _ his efforts to clarify and reconcile were supported by the two-way tendency of the masses to pursue fundamental church reforms on the one hand, and to preserve the unity of the Church on the other.
In this connection, it is recalled how long the papacy has nevertheless remained a predominantly Italian and decisive Italian political factor. After all, at the end of the 17th century, the XI. The main goal and the main result of the war against Turkey, initiated by Pope Ince and carried out mainly by Venice, was to bring Italy out of the development impasse caused by the diversion of world trade routes from the Mediterranean. On the other hand, it was the democratized organization of the Church that made it possible for the papacy to articulate the purpose of this war not in the manner of the medieval Crusades, but in the Christian peoples of the Balkans.focus on his liberation: and this allowed the Church to come into contact with the Arab freedom movements against the Turks in the war. Thus it became possible for the papacy, in alliance with the liberated Arab countries, to pass through the opening of the Suez Canal in 1689. (Interestingly, due to a typographical error in the lexicon, it is stated that it is 1869, although it is common knowledge that Pope Ince XI was personally present at the opening with all European rulers and the Caliph of Hussein and the Egyptian Sultan Abdel Gamal!) at the forefront of development. But the beneficial effect of the synod organization on European political developments prevailed much earlier, especially in the case of Hungary,{4-278}The threat of a peasant war, and twelve years after the catastrophe threatening the Mohács plain, was averted only by the peasant troops of Count György Dózsa, who arrived at the last minute. They pulled the drowning II out of the Csele stream. King Louis, who then reached a great age, and in 1576, after the extinction of the Polish Jagiellonians, he united the three kingdoms of Eastern Europe, all of which, though often limping backwards in European development, meant a certain stability in this region: the Jagiellonian House is about to die out in the slightly drunk Dobzse VII. In Stephen. RL notes that Prime Minister Mindszenty, who has always adhered strictly to the teaching of ecclesiastical state theory that monarchy is only a necessity and that the only truly worthy form of government for God's people can be a republic, took it from him,
Now new actors are emerging in the dialogue, the “anti-clericals”. In a world where the Church makes the greatest effort to influence the widest possible areas of moral, social, and spiritual life with the widest possible indulgence and flexibility, anti-clericalism is developing at three points, narrowing down to a much narrower area than we know: church and among free thinkers who consistently disregard religious frameworks, represented by Ferenc Mérei, a professor of psychology; among the people of the dangerous sciences controlled by the Church, their representative is Ede Teller, professor of nuclear physics in Budapest; finally, among the technocrats of state power and economic planning. The psychologist-free-thinker is irritated by the Church's practice of{4-279}since its re-licensing, it has rested on the individual sciences with the Jesuits specializing in psychology, and finally with the most recent order, the scientist order founded by the former Jesuits Bertrand Russell and Teilhard du Chardin. True, all of this is as liberal as it can be, and it is always ready to reshape its traditional approaches toward new scientific findings, provided they are allowed to prove that new scientific findings are essentially Christian-inspired. And whoever gets some small name, if he wasn't in it before, is in a hurry to enter the appropriate third order, given the ecclesiastical title: this is how the unbelieving Professor Freud became Father Freud, whose science was used to modernize the technique of confession. And they are willing to stifle even the moral edge of Jesus' famous saying, "He who looks upon a woman" can only prove that that the essence of the whole psychoanalysis lies in this saying. He, Merei, is opposed to all attempts at admission, his disciples are admitted in turn, his results are Christianized, he is praised, thus strengthening the world in the conviction that the Church is the helper and nurse of all sciences, although most of all these results are it could have come into being without church guardianship. Ede Teller, an atomic physicist, complains that the Church, in addition to its apparent support, is obstructing the development of the natural sciences in many respects, all of which could have been used to make an atomic bomb and space travel for a long time, but the Church last european war still does not consider the political organization of mankind and its supply of welfare and nutrition to be sufficient to entertain with such toys, which are dangerous on the one hand and expensive on the other. At this point, however, the anti-clericals turn against each other because Merei, as a humanist, is forced to endorse the position of the Church in this section. BI as e{4-280}participant in dialogue, he cautiously tries to save the position of the Church: he points out how much the Church does against superstition, e.g. it was Bishop Zola, also known from the Dreyfus affair, who, along with a merciful doctor and a naturalist piarist (before the scientists founded the Piarists mainly engaged in science), unveiled the miraculous healings in the South American Indian village of Luerdos. This trouble is, in connection with the man of state power, this exaggerated attempt by the Church to expose all so-called abuses, and her view that the truth must be uncovered even if it is unpleasant for the state authorities or even for the Church: very often hinders the development of productive forces based on all sorts of sentimental considerations. How difficult was it e.g. the possibility of colonial exploitation Dekker provosts unveiling the Dutch in Indonesia, XY unveils the Belgian Congolese, Gide abbé the unveiling of the French colonial abuses in Central Africa or the latest ecclesiastical actions against economically significant concentration camps. This view, on the other hand, is opposed by both Mérei and Teller, the first humane, the second a practical argument, so BI may conclude with some satisfaction that such an anti-clericalism has little prospect of a Latin American and liberal Church that cannot match. Merei also states melancholy that the cause of anti-clericalism would have had a serious chance if the Church had maintained the position of ideological rigidity, isolation, and persecution of opposing views expressed in 16.
BI has a nailed in his head about how close the entire eclipse was in the 16th century, and almost certainly{4-281}it would have happened if, in the 15th century, the synod movement, which had basically started almost hopelessly, had almost completely unlikely to win in the end. The joking idea of writing an uchrony (“uchrony in uchrony”) about what would have happened if the synod movement had failed (i.e., what happened in reality) is being restored, and as a result of Eastern Christianity, united with the synod movement, the Protestant congregations are organized as separate churches in the 16th century, disintegrates into Protestantism; constitutionality, democracy, enlightenment, free thinking, philanthropy and the great movements of modern science are both outside and predominantly the Catholic Church, but not least without or without the Protestant churches, and the churches are increasingly losing all initiative in the modern world, and the backwardness and retreat they get into a state. He sketches out this uchrony in a few days and takes it to show it to RL, who is deeply shocked by it, and the author, like his son-in-law, is formally sued. It sets out its objections in three points. First of all, he considers the rather anecdotal elements with which BI stirs the whole piece out of interest for the sake of curiosity to be tasteless and scandalous, e.g. that Cardinal Borgia will become a pope, it is he who burns Savonarola, and settles scandalous family riots and naked orgies in the Vatican, or that the only somewhat functioning form of church organization that rescues the unity of the Church is established by a six-wife, fornicator, bloodthirsty, and murderous king. In addition, it is absurd to even think that{4-282} that modern scholarship based on monastic asceticism and the modern idea of freedom based on Christian dignity may enjoy lasting success as independent and even anti-church movements emerging from the stream of Christian thought, and the severely catastrophic consequences of secession from ) onlyunfold in the 20th century. What he sees as the most outrageous, however, is the whole uchrony not in what is tasteless and unlikely, but in what is very likely, for the Church in the 16th century was indeed very close to falling apart into petrified orthodoxy, concentration-centered Catholicism, and atomized Protestantism: to outline it as an imagined state is nothing less than to assume that the Holy Spirit can leave the Church. BI asks if this is not possible. With this disrespectful question and RL’s shocked head shake, the work ends.
1968
Warning: this is not a professional translation. (from public domain source)
IF THE GOSPIN MOVEMENT WON IN THE 15TH CENTURY
…
Conversations of István Bibó, honorary canons of Vác, with his father-in-law, Archbishop László Ravasz, on the modern history of the Roman Catholic Church, with special regard to the Lutheran and Calvinist congregations.
Ecclesiastical, cultural and political history uchrony
{4-267} Toynbee says somewhere that if a synod movement close enough to victory at the moment in the 15th century wins, the history of all of Christianity and Europe will be different, and in all likelihood the Reformation would have failed in its divisive form. This remark was inspired by the dialogic uchrony outlined below (= reviving non-existent time series, utopias about non-existent places).model of what would have happened if the synod movement had won: the point of the idea is that in the 16th century a Catholic-Protestant-Erasmian compromise would save the unity of the Church, the constitutional movements that break the attempts at princely absolutism in the covenant of the Church, so that the interplay of enlightened absolutism falls short, and modern freedoms continue to grow organically from medieval freedoms, as in England. Thus the Church remains the framework of all European spiritual life, the Enlightenment, modern science, humanism, democracy, liberalism, socialism all take place within the framework of the Christian Church,
I note that uchrony is much less written than a utopia: there is a French author, simply entitled “Uchronia,” which is interestingly also religious in nature, but which is not based on a possibility that has actually arisen, but on a completely fictional historical turn,{4-268}according to which Kr. u. in the 2nd century, a certain letter from Cassius regenerates the whole ancient worldview, so that Europe does not become a Christian, and the ancient world passes into the world of modern enlightenment and freedom without significant interlude in the dark Christian Middle Ages. Needless to say, this whole idea is utterly unrealistic, because ancient slave “democracy” could never have transitioned to modern democracy based on the equal human dignity of all people without Christian interludes, nor the impartial, almost playfully curious nature of antiquity. without asceticism, it would not have been able to transition to modern, strictly exact science, nor would it have been possible to create a modern,
The protagonists of the dialogue are László Ravasz, Cardinal Archbishop of Pest, and István Bibó, honorary canons of Vác. It begins in 1963, when RL is just arriving from Rome for the last papal election, where Cardinal Montini was finally elected over his most likely opponent, Cardinal Vissert'Hooft, general of the Calvinist Congregation. BI, on the other hand, comes from Márianosztra, where he was treated for six years in Hungary's oldest medical institution, founded by Lajos Nagy, which he praises for its good care and administration, but complains about the inadequate and crude treatment of merciful doctors and nurses. RL reports on the debates and problems of the Constituent Assembly and the papal election since 1962. The Church is currently thrilled by two major opposites: the question of socialism and the question of free thinking. On both issues, there is a reformist wing that wants to see these trends as an integral part of Christian thought, and a conservative wing that wants to expel them from the community of the Church, even at the cost of a rift. Last seen in the 16th century{4-269}there was such a close danger of secession when, as a result of the combined efforts of Cardinal Erasmus, Cardinal Contarini and Cardinal Melanchton, the Church embraced the new secular orders, the Lutheran congregation founded by St. Martin Luther in Also the Calvinist Congregation founded by St. John. All this would not have been possible if the process of the Church's constitutional organization had not begun in the wake of the victorious Basel Council in the 15th century, and the universal and national councils, which were becoming more and more permanent institutions, for adoption. The heavier nut was, of course, swallowed by the Calvinists: since we know there was a moment, when St. John Calvin was rescued from excommunication and condemnation only by the president of the Sacra Rota, Cardinally old Cardinal Savonarola, who sympathized not so much with Calvin's theological views — of whom he did not understand much — as with a moral like my Florentine rule Calvin is furnished in Geneva. (It was Cardinal Savonarola who, at the time, passed the deprivation of the scandalous Cardinal Borgia from the cardinal's hat as a unique occasion!) The struggle between the two congregations lasted for two hundred years, until finally in the 18th century, when a strongly revolutionary Franciscan-Calvinist coalition ruled the Church, the Jesuit order was dissolved. So far, following the agitation of Cardinal Locke, Cardinal Montesquieu, and Abbot Rousseau, it has also matured to apply the program of ecclesiastical constitutionality to secular power. The Church, which has the support of universal and national councils, has been sharply opposed to the Anglican, Gallic, and Josephine attempts of state omnipotence since the 16th century,{4-270}however, he now realized that these aspirations would gain much more momentum if the Church combined the protection of its own rights with the protection of the rights of the people. Thus, with the full support of the Church, the French Revolution, led by Bishop Mirabeau and the canons of Danton, began. Louis was given an attempt by a Josephine-absolutist to articulate the civil constitution of the priesthood. It is true that Robespierre's reign of terror and the reaction to it made the church a little more cautious, but by the middle of the 19th century, the revolutions of 1848 had broken the remnants of princely absolutism all over Europe and Russia without power. the kings. However, the form of state at the heart of the Church has long been a republic, and the two leading countries of Christian liberty and social and economic progress were the two European republics, the Italian Federal Republic under the Pope and the Dutch Federal Republic. In the momentum of the 48 revolutions, the extreme left wing of the revolution, the beginning of socialism, was also under the protection of the papacy: the proclamation-like voice of the “Spectrum pervadit Europam,” which, for the first time since previous cautious experiments, Rerum Novarum in 1788, and Quadragesimo Anno in 1828, consistently articulated the Christian requirements of a just and modern social order. However, the socialist revolution, even more so, like the democratic revolution that preceded it, it raised the temptation for the Church itself, the bearer of the ideology of social transformation, to become a part of, and even a bearer of, political power in connection with the revolutionary transformation. However, since the 18th century, Christian thought has become increasingly important, especially in the wake of Voltaire's agitation.{4-271} He recognized that not only the ecclesiastical preponderance of secular power was dangerous, but also the secular preponderance of ecclesiastical power. Then, when the troops of the Italian Federal Republic under the Pope, led by Pope General Garibaldi, overthrew the Savoy House, the last obstacle to Italian unity, and the last monarchy from Italy, the pope's role in this last European war caused a great deal of moral crisis. throughout Christianity. This prompted the papacy to announce at the Vatican Council in 1870 the voluntary abolition of all secular power of the papacy, including the presidency of the Italian Federal Republic. (The same council finally clarified the long-standing issue of the pope’s infallibility, separating the politicalinfallibility of the Pope as the constitutional ruler of the Synod, who “cannot do evil” andinfallibility, which does not belong to the Pope in person, but to the Church as a whole, and essentially not to the infallibility of certain resolutions, but to the fact that the Holy Spirit as a whole does not leave the Church under any circumstances.) In the 20th century, though quite elsewhere, in Russia, where the Church finally succeeded in overthrowing the absolute monarchy. Soon, however, a situation arose in which the Russian Church also considered itself forced to take over secular power, and first Patriarch Cardinal Ulyanov and then Cardinal Patriarch Jugashvili came to power. From the first minute, Rome opposed the unification of ecclesiastical and state power in one hand, the enactment of the leading role of the Church and the resulting theocratic rule, for he feared, on the one hand, the consequences of the concentration of power for the freedom and, on the other, the possibility of the Church being discredited. However, in the international response to these developments, concerns about the issue of freedom are inextricably linked.{4-272}confused with the bourgeois-capitalist opposition to socialism. That was the stumbling block. which transferred the Calvinist congregation from its former revolutionary position to the camp of heavily rigid conservatism, in which it increasingly identified the cause of freedom with its bourgeois-capitalist forms. Thus, the Calvinists became the main movers in the so-called synagogue of the Cold War, which paralyzed the functioning of the synod for years, because the Russian church responded to the permanent vote with a permanent obstruction, and the danger of the rupture of the church reappeared seriously on the horizon. The situation changed when, after Dzhugashvili's death, Rome succeeded in persuading Cardinal Khrushchev to openly expose the excesses of power that had proliferated under his predecessor. And now there is serious hope that that the final separation of the main ecclesiastical and state functions in Russia will also succeed. In this atmosphere, the conservative coalition that ruled the church in the 1950s became more and more fragmented, so that in the 1963 papal elections, the Benedictines, Cistercians and Dominicans alike faced Vissert'Hooft, the Pálvin the spiritual father of the Cold War, the deceased Cardinal Dulles. In the new ecclesiastical governing coalition, the compromise-seeking Lutherans, the Jesuits who are slowly shifting from the center to the left and masterfully using the tools of mass psychology, and the long-left Franciscans will take the lead. Thus, in RL's view, there will be no prospect of a Calvinist pope for a long time, which he regrets, but hopes
{4-273}However, RL also says that the new ecclesiastical government, while taking the position of “opening to the left” on political issues, is more of a “Roman” trend on other issues, such as priestly infertility, virginity, and birth control. This trend, despite the fact that the Church acknowledged priestly marriage in the 16th century to demand the two Protestant congregations and all non-violent means of birth control in the 19th century to demand feminist nun orders, still favors women in high ecclesiastical offices. and widows (the majority of which is still made up of cardinals), seeks to confine and oppose cases of moral justification for birth control, given the very strong cult of Mary in the southern countries,
The dialogue then moves on to another major issue occupying the Synod, the issue of Christian free thinking. RL takes a moderate but modern position on the previous problem, while he is more conservative than neo-orthodox on BI on the issue of free thinking. He explains that Cardinal Bertrand Russell, the leader of the Free Congregation for the Modern Congregation of Scientists, explained at the Synod that the withdrawal of freethinkers from the Church could only be prevented by a clear and resolute synod resolution that would finally openly state what the One tacitly tolerate that ye. possible believing Christianity without any miracle faith (including the faith of Jesus ’bodily resurrection) and without any theological dogma faith. Refers to{4-274} prevented the separation of the Church by recognizing that the unity of the Church was confined to one Latitude,it is able to maintain a position that allows for multiple views, which leaves the clarification of questions to the longer-term work of the Holy Spirit. This behavior was later proven, e.g. in matters of Copernican worldview and Darwinism. The synod finally ended up with a cautious, compromise resolution that referred the issue to individual conscience without clear exposure. Although Cardinal Russell allowed himself to be discouraged from the radical rupture, he doubted in private whether he had done the right thing when he had founded the Congregation of Scientists with metaphysical scientists such as the prosperous Cardinal Teilhard du Chardin, and whether it was right. to write his famous pamphlet, Why I Am a Christian .
BI regrets the brutal resolution of the synod, which RL endorses. BI goes into this personal attack and rebukes RL for not preaching Christian free-thinking frontally in his preaching, but never giving a clear excuse for not believing in Christian free-thinking, and for all miracles and theological items of a metaphysical nature, always in strictly traditional phraseology. he suggested that he should not cause outrage, even for the most limited fundamentalists, although it is common knowledge that not only was he not a fundamentalist, but the modern biblical approach that followed Cardinal Harnack at the time had a significant shaping effect on him. RL explains that in his pedagogical work he never left the slightest doubt that he was not a fundamentalist, that he does not regard miracle faith as an essential element of the Christian faith, and considers himself to be the Church's teaching that dogmas are not absolute but human formulations of truths beyond human formability. He believes{4-275} , however, is a different thing about theological education, and a different thing about preaching. It’s not like he wants to introduce some kind of enlightenment reserved for clergy alone. But because preaching is not a resolution between theories , but a transmission of the message of the crucified Christ, there is no place here to confuse believers and distract them from the essence: what is right in Christian free thought is not for believers. by communicating free-thinking itemscan be conveyed, but by a preaching bringing Christ closer, which, precisely because of this closeness, without any special emphasis and wisdom, makes the primitive miracle of faith and theological dogmatism superfluous. He who cannot bring Christ closer than the traditional preaching has no right to confuse believers with the conspiracy-seeking advertising of free-thinking items, and possibly even to remove them. He, for his part, does not feel entitled to do so, and sees in the dubious and permissive preaching of many fashionable modern priests more conspicuous itching than preaching. BI acknowledges all of this, but points to the danger of free thinking being isolated in the Church, but great revivals are taking on obscurant spiritual forms over and over again.
The re-emergence of the Jewish question is also related to the issue of free thinking. Since the 18th century, the Church has unequivocally condemned all forms of anti-Semitism, hostile attitudes toward Jews, as evidenced by Bishop Zola's fight for the truth of Captain Dreyfus, who was persecuted for his Jewish origins. In the 20th century, however, the question arose in a new aspect: a trend in Christian free thinking, in agreement with Jewish free thinkers, aimed at relativizing the difference between Christianity and Judaism and reuniting the two religions in the Ten Commandments.{4-276} as a common moral foundation. From the beginning, RL was sharply opposed to any position that would try to gray out Christ's one-time and most personal message into a set of somewhat uncharacteristically general moral rules, and thus has taken and continues to take a strong stand against Christian-Jewish syncretism. Looking back today, he believes that in the heat of the polemic, many resolutions have been made on his part that are sharper than necessary, but his anger is not against Judaism and the Jews, but against dissolving the Christian teaching, and it is still directed today. However, it is a cause of deep shock for all of us that in the second quarter of the 20th century, socialunprecedented and unexpected resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and regular pogroms in Germany, in which five or even six million, so these events make the deep truth of the mountain discourse relevant to all of us, which, although not in this formulation, is nevertheless in the sense that you are. he who is angry with his neighbor has already killed him in his heart.
The debate usually deals with the crises of the Church, and it is concluded that, after all, neither socialism nor free thinking will lead to a crisis, as it did not lead to the greatest crisis in the 16th century, which is closest. was to him. The question arises as to whether, in the 16th century, when all common sense was much more in favor of the rift than against it, how it was finally remedied. RL points to the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit that enabled the collaboration and successful joint action of the three great Erasmusic cardinals. BI, on the other hand, argues with a more ground - breaking argument that it is. _ his efforts to clarify and reconcile were supported by the two-way tendency of the masses to pursue fundamental church reforms on the one hand, and to preserve the unity of the Church on the other.
In this connection, it is recalled how long the papacy has nevertheless remained a predominantly Italian and decisive Italian political factor. After all, at the end of the 17th century, the XI. The main goal and the main result of the war against Turkey, initiated by Pope Ince and carried out mainly by Venice, was to bring Italy out of the development impasse caused by the diversion of world trade routes from the Mediterranean. On the other hand, it was the democratized organization of the Church that made it possible for the papacy to articulate the purpose of this war not in the manner of the medieval Crusades, but in the Christian peoples of the Balkans.focus on his liberation: and this allowed the Church to come into contact with the Arab freedom movements against the Turks in the war. Thus it became possible for the papacy, in alliance with the liberated Arab countries, to pass through the opening of the Suez Canal in 1689. (Interestingly, due to a typographical error in the lexicon, it is stated that it is 1869, although it is common knowledge that Pope Ince XI was personally present at the opening with all European rulers and the Caliph of Hussein and the Egyptian Sultan Abdel Gamal!) at the forefront of development. But the beneficial effect of the synod organization on European political developments prevailed much earlier, especially in the case of Hungary,{4-278}The threat of a peasant war, and twelve years after the catastrophe threatening the Mohács plain, was averted only by the peasant troops of Count György Dózsa, who arrived at the last minute. They pulled the drowning II out of the Csele stream. King Louis, who then reached a great age, and in 1576, after the extinction of the Polish Jagiellonians, he united the three kingdoms of Eastern Europe, all of which, though often limping backwards in European development, meant a certain stability in this region: the Jagiellonian House is about to die out in the slightly drunk Dobzse VII. In Stephen. RL notes that Prime Minister Mindszenty, who has always adhered strictly to the teaching of ecclesiastical state theory that monarchy is only a necessity and that the only truly worthy form of government for God's people can be a republic, took it from him,
Now new actors are emerging in the dialogue, the “anti-clericals”. In a world where the Church makes the greatest effort to influence the widest possible areas of moral, social, and spiritual life with the widest possible indulgence and flexibility, anti-clericalism is developing at three points, narrowing down to a much narrower area than we know: church and among free thinkers who consistently disregard religious frameworks, represented by Ferenc Mérei, a professor of psychology; among the people of the dangerous sciences controlled by the Church, their representative is Ede Teller, professor of nuclear physics in Budapest; finally, among the technocrats of state power and economic planning. The psychologist-free-thinker is irritated by the Church's practice of{4-279}since its re-licensing, it has rested on the individual sciences with the Jesuits specializing in psychology, and finally with the most recent order, the scientist order founded by the former Jesuits Bertrand Russell and Teilhard du Chardin. True, all of this is as liberal as it can be, and it is always ready to reshape its traditional approaches toward new scientific findings, provided they are allowed to prove that new scientific findings are essentially Christian-inspired. And whoever gets some small name, if he wasn't in it before, is in a hurry to enter the appropriate third order, given the ecclesiastical title: this is how the unbelieving Professor Freud became Father Freud, whose science was used to modernize the technique of confession. And they are willing to stifle even the moral edge of Jesus' famous saying, "He who looks upon a woman" can only prove that that the essence of the whole psychoanalysis lies in this saying. He, Merei, is opposed to all attempts at admission, his disciples are admitted in turn, his results are Christianized, he is praised, thus strengthening the world in the conviction that the Church is the helper and nurse of all sciences, although most of all these results are it could have come into being without church guardianship. Ede Teller, an atomic physicist, complains that the Church, in addition to its apparent support, is obstructing the development of the natural sciences in many respects, all of which could have been used to make an atomic bomb and space travel for a long time, but the Church last european war still does not consider the political organization of mankind and its supply of welfare and nutrition to be sufficient to entertain with such toys, which are dangerous on the one hand and expensive on the other. At this point, however, the anti-clericals turn against each other because Merei, as a humanist, is forced to endorse the position of the Church in this section. BI as e{4-280}participant in dialogue, he cautiously tries to save the position of the Church: he points out how much the Church does against superstition, e.g. it was Bishop Zola, also known from the Dreyfus affair, who, along with a merciful doctor and a naturalist piarist (before the scientists founded the Piarists mainly engaged in science), unveiled the miraculous healings in the South American Indian village of Luerdos. This trouble is, in connection with the man of state power, this exaggerated attempt by the Church to expose all so-called abuses, and her view that the truth must be uncovered even if it is unpleasant for the state authorities or even for the Church: very often hinders the development of productive forces based on all sorts of sentimental considerations. How difficult was it e.g. the possibility of colonial exploitation Dekker provosts unveiling the Dutch in Indonesia, XY unveils the Belgian Congolese, Gide abbé the unveiling of the French colonial abuses in Central Africa or the latest ecclesiastical actions against economically significant concentration camps. This view, on the other hand, is opposed by both Mérei and Teller, the first humane, the second a practical argument, so BI may conclude with some satisfaction that such an anti-clericalism has little prospect of a Latin American and liberal Church that cannot match. Merei also states melancholy that the cause of anti-clericalism would have had a serious chance if the Church had maintained the position of ideological rigidity, isolation, and persecution of opposing views expressed in 16.
BI has a nailed in his head about how close the entire eclipse was in the 16th century, and almost certainly{4-281}it would have happened if, in the 15th century, the synod movement, which had basically started almost hopelessly, had almost completely unlikely to win in the end. The joking idea of writing an uchrony (“uchrony in uchrony”) about what would have happened if the synod movement had failed (i.e., what happened in reality) is being restored, and as a result of Eastern Christianity, united with the synod movement, the Protestant congregations are organized as separate churches in the 16th century, disintegrates into Protestantism; constitutionality, democracy, enlightenment, free thinking, philanthropy and the great movements of modern science are both outside and predominantly the Catholic Church, but not least without or without the Protestant churches, and the churches are increasingly losing all initiative in the modern world, and the backwardness and retreat they get into a state. He sketches out this uchrony in a few days and takes it to show it to RL, who is deeply shocked by it, and the author, like his son-in-law, is formally sued. It sets out its objections in three points. First of all, he considers the rather anecdotal elements with which BI stirs the whole piece out of interest for the sake of curiosity to be tasteless and scandalous, e.g. that Cardinal Borgia will become a pope, it is he who burns Savonarola, and settles scandalous family riots and naked orgies in the Vatican, or that the only somewhat functioning form of church organization that rescues the unity of the Church is established by a six-wife, fornicator, bloodthirsty, and murderous king. In addition, it is absurd to even think that{4-282} that modern scholarship based on monastic asceticism and the modern idea of freedom based on Christian dignity may enjoy lasting success as independent and even anti-church movements emerging from the stream of Christian thought, and the severely catastrophic consequences of secession from ) onlyunfold in the 20th century. What he sees as the most outrageous, however, is the whole uchrony not in what is tasteless and unlikely, but in what is very likely, for the Church in the 16th century was indeed very close to falling apart into petrified orthodoxy, concentration-centered Catholicism, and atomized Protestantism: to outline it as an imagined state is nothing less than to assume that the Holy Spirit can leave the Church. BI asks if this is not possible. With this disrespectful question and RL’s shocked head shake, the work ends.
1968