[Catholic Caucus] How to Write Your Own Encyclical

Crisis Magazine ^ | September 23, 2019 | Fr. George W. Rutler

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[Catholic Caucus] How to Write Your Own Encyclical

This past summer, what is now called the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family was “reconstituted” with an abruptness and thoroughness that scandalized over forty international scholars, who objected to the firing of several distinguished professors. It was a real purge—a term for which German has many equivalents such as Saüberung and Reinigung, but which Italian invariably would call epurazione.  The Institute retains the name “John Paul II,” but that only serves now as an ironic reminder that it has distanced itself from the theology, philosophy, and prophetic vision of that pontiff.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, oversaw the “reconstitution” of the Institute, of which he is also Grand Chancellor. When he was bishop of Terni-Narni-Amelia, Monsignor Paglia commissioned a large mural by Ricardo Cinalli, an Argentinian whose Uranian appetites are on full display in the erotic figures depicted—including the future Grand Chancellor. In 2016, Paglia also supervised the publication of a Vatican-approved sex education booklet; in response, Dr Richard Fitzgibbons, a psychiatrist who was a consultant to the Holy See’s Congregation for the Clergy and adjunct professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America, said: “this obscene or pornographic approach abuses youth psychologically and spiritually.”

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If you make a list of jargonish adjectives and another of jargonish nouns, you are on your way to writing your own neoplastic academic speech, papal audience address, Apostolic Exhortation, or even your own Encyclical. Look through the ever-lengthening volumes of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis and other pontifical sources, and you can find inventive adjectives like “integrally ecological,” “planetary,” “dialectical,” “epochal,” “nuanced,” “ontological,” “clericalist,” “osteoporotic,” “neo-Pelagian,” “leprous,” “sloth-diseased,” “schizophrenic,” “paradigmatic,” “issue-oriented,” “cosmetic,” and “pickle pepper-faced.”  Then in the column of nouns you can list, for starters: “field hospital,” “coprophagist,” “nominalist,” “soap bubble,” “rigidity,” “peripheries,” “paradigm,” “dicastery,” and “ecological debt.”

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Ping

[Mrs. Don-o]

“Jargon wird niemals kaputt sein” =
“Jargon will never be broken.”