Word: weigel
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Last fortnight the Rev. Gustave Weigel, a distinguished Jesuit theologian, backed Kennedy's interpretations in a formal statement (TIME, Oct. 10). Last week a group of 169 prominent Catholic laymen -including such ardent Democrats as Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy and Connecticut's Senator Tom Dodd, and such solid Nixon Republicans as former Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce and Professor Francis G. Wilson of the University of Illinois -published a landmark "statement of religious liberty." The statement not only backed Kennedy's position that his religion could and would not compromise his actions as President, but went...
...religion, Jack Kennedy has announced that neither bishop nor Pope would tell him what to do as President. Many a Protestant has applauded his forthright words but wanted to hear Kennedy's view of Roman Catholic theology underwritten by an official Catholic spokesman. Last week the Reverend Gustave Weigel, professor of ecclesiology at Maryland's Woodstock College, stepped forward not as an official spokesman but as a distinguished Jesuit theologian to express his views. What emerged from Father Weigel's closely reasoned speech on the church-state relationship is the fact that Jack Kennedy has not been...
...Father Weigel begins with the premise of two orders, sacral and secular, governed by divine and human law. Each is autonomous in its own sphere. Divine law concerns man's relationship to God, human law his relationship to his fellow beings. The secular order is inferior to but not subject to the sacral. Man lives in both orders simultaneously, and when they conflict, it is commonly agreed that the individual abides by the dictates of his conscience whether he be Protestant, Jew or Catholic. With this basis stated. Father Weigel turns to some implied questions by "the thinking Protestant...
...Father Weigel sees it, three qualities characterize the style, or stance, of American Protestantism: 1) audacity, 2) intellectuality, 3) modernity. In each he finds a virtue and the defect of that virtue. By audacity, Father Weigel points out, he does not mean "a bullying spirit, much less rudeness." It consists rather of "a naive and energetic thrust forward from an idea sincerely conceived. From Luther's day onward, simplicity of soul and freedom of the spirit were always characteristic of the churches of the Reform." Liberal or fundamentalist, the Protestant derives an "enthusiastic assuredness" from his "unconcern for tradition...
...Immanuel. Disagreeing with those Catholics who "glibly say that Protestantism is emotionalism," Father Weigel insists "it has an intellectuality. It favors scholarship and has always produced it." Scientific exegesis, of scriptural texts has been "mainly a Protestant endeavor." But Protestant intellectualism, according to Father Weigel, is empirical, skeptical, relativistic, qualitatively derived from Kantian philosophy ("Immanuel Kant has rightly been called 'the Protestant Thomas Aquinas' "). Scientifically approached, God, or at least the historical Jesus, becomes "the great unknown." Argues Weigel: "There is here a despair of knowledge." Protestants evade this despair by a leap of faith powered...