In Borghesi's new 2021 book, he quotes something that Pope Francis says in the 2020 book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future: In Conversation with Austen Ivereigh (New York: Simon & Schuster, esp. pages 55-57):
Borghesi says, "Discernment," [Pope] Francis says, allows us to navigate changing contexts and specific situations as we seek the truth. Truth reveals itself to the one who opens herself [or himself?] to it. That is what the ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia, means: what reveals itself; what is unveiled. The Hebrew vowel emet, on the other hand, connects truth to fidelity, to what is certain, what is firm, what does not deceive or disappoint. So truth has these two elements" (page 32).
Borghesi then says, "Truth is objective, and, at the same time, requires the moment of persuasion, of certainty. A Christianity accepted only as a dogmatic system, as an ideology that offers security in an uncertain world, does not change one's life and does not bring joy. This is the problem with 'Christianism.' Hard as stone, muscular, it flaunts faith as a possession and not as an undeserved grace. Truth-in-itself must, on the contrary, become truth-for-me. It must move toward gratitude. Otherwise, even if formally true, it remains 'abstract'; it does not touch the heart, the self, in its deepest reality" (page 32).
Now, concerning Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical, Borghesi quotes something Massimo Faggioli published in 2016: "[Pope] Francis is a radical social Catholic. He defends a way of life and a social system that is threatened by what he calls in the [2015] encyclical Laudato si' 'the technocratic paradigm.' He is also a progressive Catholic, in the sense that he has no nostalgia for an idealized past. Yet there is an anti-modern mindset in him typical of Catholic thinkers of the 1930s (the decade he was born), such as Romano Guardini [1885-1968] whom he quotes more than once in Laudato si'. The fact that some progressive Catholics are reluctant to abolish the established Church model is connected to the role the Church plays within the 'technocratic paradigm' (to use the pope's phrase). For instance, the established Church is one of the few remaining bastions against the destruction of the welfare state, [against] 'turbo capitalism' and [against] the radical individualization of human life" (quoted on pages 174-175).
Yes, as Faggioli points out, Pope Francis tends to quote Romano Guardini's book The End of the Modern World, translated by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke and Elinor C. Briefs; with an "Introduction" by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen; and a "Foreword" by Richard John Neuhaus (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books/ Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998).
As Borghesi notes (pages 29-32), the Argentinian Jesuit Father Bergoglio started to write his doctoral dissertation in theology on Guardini's influential work, but Bergoglio did not ever complete his dissertation.
Now, in the "Introduction" to the 1994 second edition of his 1965 book Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ; and London: Transaction Publishers), mentioned above, the American Catholic neoconservative polemicist Michael Novak (1933-2017) says the following:
"[Richard] Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not 'the mirror of nature' he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. [but] What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [see Walter J. Ong's mature work from the early 1950s onward]. We do not know simply through 'looking at' reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's 1958 critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, 'Oh, I see!' But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than 'seeing,' and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, 'Look!' [Ah, but what about the imperative, 'Hear, O Israel!'?] Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and 'looking for' the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectal argument and self-correction" (page xv).
As I noted in brackets, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) delineates the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in Western culture in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press; for specific page references, see the "Index" [page 396]). In it, Ong also discusses what he variously refers to as the corpuscular sense of life (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 196, 203, 210, and 286). Which is to say that Ong, like Lonergan and Novak, holds a non-materialist philosophical position.
For further discussion of Ong's account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in Western culture, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
For further discuss ion the non-materialist philosophical position, see Mortimer J. Adler's accessible 1990 book Intellect: Mind Over Matter (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan).
Ong was familiar with the German edition of Romano Guardini's book translated as The End of the Modern World, mentioned above (but also see Borghesi's "Index" for specific page references to Guardini [page 267]), and with the French Jesuit philosopher Gaston Fessard (see Borghesi's "Index" [page 267]). Of course, like young Jorge Mario Bergoglio, young Walter J. Ong also made a 30-day retreat in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
In addition, Ong published "Newman's Essay on Development in Its Intellectual Milieu" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 7, number 1 (March 1946): pages 3-45. It is reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992b, pages 1-37).
Borghesi quotes Pope Francis remarks about John Henry Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine on page 33, note 65.
Pope Francis canonized John Henry Newman a saint in October 2019.
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