COMMENTARY: Science and Religion _ Again

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.) (UNDATED) Some observers claim science and religion are necessarily opposed to each other. Since no deep thinker […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) Some observers claim science and religion are necessarily opposed to each other. Since no deep thinker in either science or faith believes that, why, except to fill newspaper columns in midsummer, does the argument continue?


Perhaps because this very summer, almost in the same week, science acted as if it were religion and religion behaved as if it were science.

Physicists told us that beneath the quarks and neutrinos of which they speak so knowingly, they have come upon another realm that “involves laws of symmetry” _ how nature obeys them, and especially how it breaks them.

The 30th Annual Conference on High Energy Physics at Osaka, Japan, heralded “a new round of research to determine the exact degree of nature’s lopsidedness.” Were nature not slightly askew, the equal amounts of matter and anti-matter after the Big Bang would have “annihilated each other.”

Physicists use religious language to describe this as a “mystery” _ that there is something like an original sin in creation that leaves everything and everybody off-balance, imperfect, as we might say, a little less than the angelic all around.

The latest in physics is old news in religion. Why, we may ask with a bow to Teilhard de Chardin, should not we, who are of nature, reflect, by what is lopsided in us, that which so mysteriously and necessarily is off-kilter in all creation?

Simultaneously, the Vatican issued a new General Instruction on the Roman Missal, settling, according to Catholic News Service, “several points of debate” including genuflections during Mass.

Busy with healthier and more sensible concerns, you may have missed this pseudo-problem that church bureaucrats solve with a definition: “A genuflection, which is made by bending the right knee to the ground, signifies adoration.”


The genuflection differs, we are told as if we could not make the distinctions ourselves, from “a bow, which is a sign of reverence, or the kiss of the altar … which signifies veneration.”

This is the Vatican making a science out of religion, providing operational definitions for external movements that are supposed to express inner religious sentiments.

If you are a Catholic and cannot tell the difference between a genuflection, a bow and a kiss of the altar, you had better check your baptismal papers. Officials who offer blueprints for these actions should go to a real church and watch people as they genuflect, bow or carry out any and everything else connected with their prayer lives.

There is a strong family resemblance in the way Catholics do these things but hardly any uniformity. Catholics, for example, make the sign of the cross with a flurry of fingers aimed in the general direction of their persons. You can always tell that actors who sign themselves with great precision belong to another church or they would have shaken off the military salute style long ago.

Observe people as they genuflect. They use the right knee, of course, but the movement is often a quick bob that grazes the floor by misadventure more than planned piety. Watch them as they follow the Mass, each with a strategy developed long before for kneeling, half-kneeling, mostly sitting and, in recent years, with pew-supported standing.

Observe them as they go to receive the Eucharist, each with a hitch, a bow or a sign of the cross that might be a semaphore signal to a distant ship.


It is that variation, that something extra, like the P.S. on a letter, that carries the distinctive message of their priceless individuality.

These holy variations are signs of good people’s ease and intimacy in the presence of their God. As they approach for the Eucharist, are they not all pilgrims _ some limping, some bent with age, some bearing broken hearts _ bringing themselves in all their imperfection, just as they are, to receive the Lord? And, as they turn away, can we not see that, in some way that defies measurement, they seem cured as surely as if their spines had been straightened and their sorrows set to flight?

It happens every day at a church near you, this gathering of the lopsided who reflect the cracked glory of creation, these imperfect, yes, and sinful people _ they admit that freely _ who are as wise in the ways of worship as they are in the woes of existence.

Who do you think describes them and their faith better, the physicists who appreciate our lopsided grandeur or the bureaucrats who think that heaven must be stormed in military formation?

DEA END KENNEDY

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