FAST FOOD AD 2026, Twenty-Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD AD 2026, Twenty-Eighth Helping

Many Catholics today have a deep suspicion of the so-called Schniftgelehrten — the university-trained theology scholars who, they claim, artfully dodged the clear and simple teachings of Jesus by appealing to complex, convoluted, multi disciplined, carefully doubled-nuanced and crafted arguments, for the purpose of befogging the obvious and sane meaning of a teaching by Jesus, so as to make its meaning appear murky, questionable or even contrary to what the normal reader would ascribe to it. Such suspicious Catholics are usually dismissed by the media and their fellow Christians as anti-intellectual and sectarian.

When Mother Teresa, whom no one would designate a scholar or sectarian, but who did prayerful ponder and try to live the truth she found in the Gospels, was asked by a Catholic reporter if she believed in the just war theory, she answered with a resolute, “No.” The reporter retorted that Catholics have to believe in the just war theory. She replied, “Then am I not a Catholic?” Mother Teresa’s rejection of the just war was solely from meditating on the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels and applying it. I know a score of Catholic scholars, however, who could make Mother Teresa’s or any Christian’s total rejection of the just war on the basis of the Gospels appear childish, foolish, naive and even borderline schismatic—and who spend their lives earning a nice livelihood doing just that.

Many of the best and the brightest in the Church, or most of the best and the brightest in the Church, say that the way they interpret the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels is that it permits them to substitute the principles of some form of natural law, usually stoicism, on moral matters, which Jesus explicitly addresses.

As someone who has spent an enormous amount of his one life’s time reading philosophy and theology, I am obviously not anti-intellectual. But I do believe the Schniftgelehrten issue is a problem in Catholicism and in Christianity. Evidence of this is that Catholic libraries are bulging with books and treatises by university trained Catholic scholars interpreting, systematizing and propagandizing methods for morally validating violence, enmity and war as being in conformity with Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels, as are classrooms in Catholic colleges, universities and seminaries being so employed. Tremendous amounts of time, energy, and private, government, and Church money are today being poured into keeping “front and center” in U.S. Catholics’ minds the scholarship of certain recently prominent scholars — scholarship which, with all the trappings of advanced learning, claims that either Jesus did not mean the clear meaning of what He said, or He did not mean for people to live what He taught.

Yet, Pope Leo XIV publicly agreed with Mother Teresa in his Palm Sunday homily this year: ‘Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, and whom no one can use to justify war.’

However, I will leave the last word on the Schniftgelehrten phenomena in the Church to the most prominent public intellectual of the mid-Twentieth Century, Professor of theology at Union Theological School in New York for thirty years, a just warist and a person committed to the theology of Christian Realism which is intrinsically violent, Reinhold Neibuhr, who wrote,

“It is very foolish to deny that the ethic of Jesus is an absolute and uncompromising ethic. The injunctions ‘resist not evil’, ‘love your enemies’, ‘be not anxious for your life’ are all of one piece, and they are all uncompromising and absolute. In the world as it is, forces over which we have no control may drive our nation into a war which appears as the lesser of two evils; but, when Christians take up arms, there is nothing in either the teaching or example of Jesus which would justify us in pointing to Him as our precedent. Nothing is more futile and pathetic than the effort of some Christian theologians who find it necessary to become involved in the relativities of politics or in resistance to tyranny or in social conflict, to justify themselves by seeking to prove that Christ was also involved in some of these relativities, that he used whips to drive the money changers out of the Temple, or that He came ‘not to bring peace but a sword’ or that He asked the disciples to ‘sell a cloak and buy a sword.’ The necessity of making ‘relative judgments’ may drive us to compromise, but that does not alter the essentially uncompromising nature of Jesus’ commands: Those of us who regard the ethic of Jesus as finally and ultimately normative, but as not immediately applicable to the task of securing justice in a sinful world, are very foolish if we try to reduce the ethic so that it will cover and justify our prudential and relative moral standards and strategies.

 The debate between pacifist and non-pacifist ought not to be, ‘Does Jesus command this?’ but rather, ‘Does He mean us to obey what appears to be a plain command, and will He give us power to do so?’” 

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

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“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!

Hosanna in the highest!