Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) February 28, 2025: In the American investigative journalist Philip Shenon's "Introduction" in his bleak new 2025 book Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church (Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 3-12), he uses the words "investigative history" in the opening line of his text (p. 3). I have the feeling that the two words "investigative history" are supposed to impress the reader -- and cast an aura of awe over the reader.
Also on the opening page of his text, Philip Shenon says that the Roman Catholic Church "is easily the most important institution in the history of Western civilization" (p. 3). Because I agree with him about this, I construct a fourfold media ecology account of our Western cultural history as the broader cultural context for considering Philip Shenon's bleak new 2025 book Jesus Wept.
Also on the opening page of his text, Philip Shenon forewarns about that his account of the seven most recent popes will be bleak when he says, "The impact of the Roman Catholic Church - for good and, with heart-breaking regularity, for ill, -- has always been disproportionate to its actual number" (p. 3). No doubt the priest-sex-abuse scandal is a heart-breaking scandal.
I agree with Philip Shenon that he is indeed reporting about "the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church" as he notes in the subtitle of his book - and I do not expect that this ongoing battle for the soul of the Catholic Church will be resolved in the near future. The battle will no doubt continue under Pope Francis' successor.
As I write the present "Probe" essay (on February 28, 2025), it appears that the papacy of Pope Francis may end soon. The aging pope (born in 1936) is ailing. He might resign for health reasons, or he might die. In either case, a conclave to elect a new pope may be called in the near future.
Now, I see the battle for the soul of the Catholic Church as involving Catholic moral theology regarding individual personal moral ideals - some of which I myself have explicitly criticized in my OEN article "Robert Moore on Optimal Human Psychological Development" (dated September 17, 2024).
Now, in the present lengthy essay, I proceed to engage in extremely associative thinking as I succinctly review Philip Shenon's bleak new 2025 book Jesus Wept. In the present essay, I provide only two subheadings to alert the reader to my various shifts in my extremely associative thinking. They say that forewarned is forearmed. So I have now forewarned you about my extremely associative thinking in the present essay, and so I now hope that you stand forearmed for my extremely associative thinking in the present essay. In my estimate, as a result of my extremely associative thinking in the present essay, it is a tour de force. But you can judge this for yourself.
In any event, an explanation is in order here about why I use an extremely associative style in the present essay. The prolific Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) devotes a chapter in his book Symbols of Transformation (1967) to "Two Kinds of Thinking" (pp. 7-33) in our Western cultural history: (1) fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, on the one hand, and, on the other, (2) directed thinking involving logic. I use an extremely associative style in the present "Probe" essay as my way of honoring the spirit of what Jung styles as fantasy thinking.
Now, in the present "Probe" essay, I draw extensively on the thought of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis. Father Ong's pioneering media ecology account of our Western cultural history is his massively researched 1958 book titled Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason - as in the Age of Reason. It involves the history of the formal study of logic from the time of Aristotle in ancient Greek culture down to the time of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and beyond.
The famous English Renaissance poet John Milton (1608-1674) studied Ramist logic in Latin at Cambridge University. Later in Milton's life, he himself wrote a textbook in Ramist logic in Latin. Still later in Milton's life, after he had become a famous poet and pamphleteer, he published his textbook in Ramist logic in Latin in 1672.
Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger co-edited and co-translated Milton's 1672 textbook in Ramist logic in Latin in volume eight of Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume VIII: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (1982, pp. 139-4-7) - with a magnificent "Introduction" by Ong (pp. 144-207). Ong's magnificent "Introduction" is reprinted as "Introduction to Milton's Logic" in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1999, pp. 111-142).
Now, in Ong's massively researched 1958 book, he sets forth an account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history from the time of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greek manuscript culture through medieval manuscript culture down to the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. (For specific pages references to the aural-to-visual shift, see that entry in the "Index" on Ong's massively researched 1958 book [p. 396].)
Because of the centrality of the formal study of logic in our Western cultural history from the time of Aristotle in ancient Greek manuscript culture onward, what Jung refers to as directed thinking involving logic has been the prestigious style in Western philosophy from the time of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greek manuscript culture down to the time of Peter Ramus in print culture and beyond.
However, after Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue about print culture in our Western cultural history was published in 1958, Ong subsequently came to make the crucial differentiation of what he termed primary oral culture from what he termed secondary oral culture.
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