John Burnheim's "To Reason Why": A Review (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Tuesday, February 14, 2012, 08:55 (465 days ago)
edited by James, Tuesday, February 14, 2012, 19:05

Dr. John Burnheim, a former Professor of Philosophy at St. Columba’s Seminary, Springwood, and Rector of St. John’s College, in the University of Sydney, left the Catholic Church in 1968, after 18 years in the priesthood, becoming a lecturer in philosophy and ultimately Professor of General Philosophy at Sydney University.

Burnheim has just published a very easy to read autobiography, “To Reason Why: From Religion to Philosophy and Beyond” - unfortunately not yet available electronically. It is not the story of a man going through a Herculean struggle with his faith, and finally coming out agnostic or atheist at the other end. It is rather that of a man who quietly reasoned his way out of the Church, and who prefers not to describe himself by the negative, “atheist”, but by something more positive, a “secular humanist”.

His descriptions of his early Catholic upbringing and seminary life are both interesting and typical for the immediate post war period. He was one of many who flocked to seminaries and religious houses straight out of Catholic schools, convinced that they were going to make a better world.

In some ways the apologetics of the period contained the seeds of its own destruction that led eventually to the massive exit from the pews from the seventies onwards. Faith was necessary but,

“…understanding was important, both for its intrinsic value as truth and its role in showing unbelievers that there were sound objective grounds for believing. It was not just a matter of personal feelings or opinions, as most people assumed. What mattered was to ground one’s life on what was objectively true. As Catholic apologists put it to heretics of all sorts, ‘you worship God in your way, but we worship him in his.’”

Despite this philosophy of “objective truth”, the seminary authorities were very distrustful of any signs of independence in thought.

“The root source of most error was intellectual pride, the urge to put one‘s own judgment above that of everybody else. Pride was the worst of all sins, the sin of Lucifer himself, and intellectual pride was the source of all error, the basic spiritual evil, compared to which the sins of the flesh were relatively innocuous.”

Burnheim points out, in fairness, that this sort of suspicions of independent thinking was not restricted to the seminary.

“Awful as it sounds today, this regime was only an extreme instance of much educational practice at the time, especially in Australia. A great deal of professional education was devoted to rote learning of facts and terminology without any critical understanding…At Sydney University, the philosophical radical, John Anderson, dictated his lectures to students who were then expected to take them down and regurgitate them in examinations.”

Burnheim describes how his lectures in philosophy at St. Columba’s seminary were in Latin, from moldy Latin text published in Rome. But the lecturers usually broke out into English explanations which,

“..failed completely to show why anybody would be interested in this stuff, except as the professional mumbo-jumbo that all professions seemed to need to exclude lay people from intruding into their domains.”

The philosophy taught was “dreadful”. At best it was an awful simplification of Aristotle and was taught by men “who said what they said because, according to ecclesiastical officialdom, that was the party line.” The party line was obsessed with the idea that Catholic dogmas were literally true and not just metaphorical pointers to mysteries beyond human comprehension.

The Catholic doctrine of “natural law” underpinned much of the Church’s moral teaching. The basic idea was that every creature has some purpose prescribed by nature, and while animals follow that instinctively, human beings had free will and had to form their behavior to that purpose. But if you take a narrow view of that, you end up with a “very repressive pattern”.

“Eating and drinking for pleasure rather than nourishment seem perfectly harmless in moderation, provided our overall diet is healthy and nourishing. So why must each and every sexual activity be open to procreation, especially as it is not claimed that everybody has an obligation to marry and procreate? In practice, Catholic theologians took a rigorist line on the teleology of sex and a liberal line on almost everything else, for no convincing reason.”

As with so many other people who left the Church at this time, one of the things that influenced Burnheim was the disappointing and regressive role that the Church was playing in human affairs, while it tied itself up in knots with “natural law” arguments over anything to do with sex.

“It was becoming increasingly obvious that the fight against social evils in modern times, against racism, exploitation, slavery and tyranny had been led, not by the Church, but by secular humanists. The best one could claim was that in doing so, they were drawing on the resources of the Christian tradition.”

Burnheim describes how, after spending some time as a curate in a parish, he went to the Maynooth seminary in Ireland to do a M.A., and then to the University of the Louvain to do a Ph.D. In the course of his studies, he came to the view that if there were a Creator, it would not only be conceivable, but likely that he would choose to reveal his purposes. As one of his atheist friends told him, if God flashed a message up on every TV or mobile screen in the world, in everyone’s language, and there was absolutely no physical explanation for the phenomenon, one would have to take it seriously. But when you look at the claims of the Church to be the recipient of some divine revelation, the traditional reliance on the miracles of Jesus was weak in the light of historical criticism.

It seemed clear to me that the outstanding candidate among competing claims to embody such revelation was the Catholic Church, and that in the long run that claim can be tested only in terms of its capacity in practice to live up to its own claims, to manifest its redeeming message in action…if religion is seen as a matter of objective truth, in my view…the choice came down to one of Catholicism or atheism.”

Needless to say, the Catholic Church eventually lost that argument with Burnheim – as it did with so many others. When Burnheim was teaching philosophy in the seminary in the late 1950s, both Springwood and Manly were bursting at the seams and both places had to build new additions to house the students. But within 20 years, both seminaries were closed and makeshift arrangements had to be made for the trickle of “vocations”.

As with many priests of the time, the Second Vatican Council was the high point of his hopes for the Church. But it had only just finished when the traditionalists started their rear guard action to undermine it. The Vatican reverted to its authoritarianism.

“Discussion of matters of sexual ethics in particular was thoroughly suppressed, and liberal theologians removed from teaching wherever possible. It was crystal clear that having declared itself infallible, the papacy was deeply afraid of giving the appearance of admitting it had been wrong on a matter of such great concern to almost everybody as sexual ethics. It made an enormous, fatal mistake. Not only did it cause great disappointment, but it set in train a radical change of attitude to authority in the Church.”

The era of the so called “cafeteria Catholics” had begun. They identified with core traditions of the Church but felt free to disagree with things that they regarded as inflexible and insensitive. As Burnheim points out, this was something that the laity could easily adapt to, but for many priests, it posed acute problems. They felt that they could no longer represent officially an authority that they saw as deeply discredited.

“Very many left the ministry and vocations dried up overnight, falling to a tenth of what they had been a few years before….even forty years later, vocations have not recovered.”

But for Burnheim, the issue ran deeper than just that,

“The Church had failed the crucial test. It was no longer possible to see it as the vehicle of divine revelation. The whole basis of my religion had collapsed. In my view the very existence of a personal god was plausible only if that god revealed itself to the world and the only plausible candidate for the revelation had now discredited itself…the Church itself in solemn Council had recognized that the authoritarian practices of past had to be superseded, but that it had shown itself incapable of keeping its promise.”

Burnheim does not mention the sex abuse scandal or the cover up in his book, but it is obvious that it simply confirms the conclusions that he had already reached. The behavior of the hierarchy, its retreat into the citadel of authoritarianism, and its behavior over clergy sex abuse that can only be compared with some of the worst examples of corporate thuggery. It only provides more evidence for those who cannot accept that a personal God would employ such people to be his messengers, let alone his Vicars.

On his own personal journey out of the faith he says,

“The surprising fact was that I no longer felt the need for a religious commitment, and it seemed that relatively few other people were worried any longer by the secularization of culture. Humanism allowed the reflective appropriation of the poetry and sensibility of religions once they were shorn of pretentions of authority. All that was lost was the security provided by specious authority.”

But of course, not all priests left the Church, and one whom he particularly admired was Fr. Ted Kennedy, a person of “discriminating tastes, but his presbytery was often full of drunks sleeping off their excesses”. But his passing provided more evidence of the point he has been making.

“Ecclesiastical officialdom was very disturbed by his disregard for conventional propriety. When he died, worn out by his labours, they moved quickly to close down the community he had built and sustained.”

Burnheim admits frankly in the book that he was not a person with a huge sex drive, so he never really felt, like so many others, that celibacy was an arbitrary imposition.

So it was not a source of resentment, but the price I had to pay for the sort of trust people accorded to me. My life in the Church had not been a waste of time, but an education that had led me to come to grips with some of the fundamental problems facing us. It had been a constructive experience, very limited and limiting in important aspects, as every experience must be, but not a matter for regret.”

In describing his leaving the Church, he says that he left with little sense of loss, “but no great feeling of liberation”. His family accepted his decision even if they could not understand it. He did not think there was any point in attacking the Church. “It no longer mattered very much”.

Burnheim obtained a position as a lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University, married and had two daughters. The second half of the book is devoted to his life at the University and the tumultuous divisions in the Faculty of Philosophy that ultimately led to there being two Faculties of Philosophy of which he became the Professor of General Philosophy. Another of the Church’s intelligentsia at the time, Dr. Paul Crittenden who had also left priesthood and the Church, was also at the University at the same time. He subsequently became Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

This book is highly recommended. It is very easy to read and very calmly written. The second half dealing with the philosophical struggles and streams at Sydney University is understandably a bit more difficult to follow, but it is worth persevering with it. Unfortunately it is only available at the moment in hard copy through Darlington Press at http://fmx01.ucc.usyd.edu.au/jspcart/users/Login.jsp?txtRedirect=%2Fjspcart%2Fusers%2FM... . [It is now listed on Amazon and I've added it to the Catholica Spiritual Marketplace at: http://www.catholica.com.au/marketplace/amazon/. It's not yet available from Fishpond or other distributors. ...BMC (Editor)]

The book demonstrates why the abandonment of the pews by so many Catholics, over the last forty years cannot just be put down to a failure of catechesis. It really all comes back to something that Jesus said, and that can be applied to the hierarchy that have ruled the Church since the Second Vatican Council, “By their fruits you shall know them.” No improvements in catechesis can get over that. Or, as Burnheim would have put it, the Church "doesn’t matter much anymore". And that is really the problem that Benedict is talking about when he attacks "secularism" and “indifferentism”.