Anima Christi

Home At Last

2006-08-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

I wrote out some of my memories from the past month tonight. Here are some pictures too. This will be my last blog post. I guess that's about it.

8:02 PM July 3rd, 2006 you were born at St. Luke’s in Bethlehem. 6 lbs and 9 oz, scrawny and lean like your Dad. Came out screaming like a good baby should, and nice and pink. They left you with us, and we each held you for quite awhile. I left to scare up some food, but the best my hunter-gatherer instincts could muster was some Arby’s down the street. Mom and I ate, and then you tried to nurse. We were both tired by this time, and you were baby #2, so we were content to send you to the nursery to catch some sleep. Little goodbye kisses on your ducky little head, we would have held you longer if we knew what lay ahead.

2:30 in the morning they woke us up and told us you had been sent to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) because you oxygen levels were dropping and your breathing was laboured. We were perplexed, but relatively assured that you were alright. We got a look at you about a half hour later, just a little oxygen through the nose. Breathing a little heavy, but still healthy and pink. Went back to the room to try to sleep. Later they said you needed to get an echocardiogram to check out your heart, so our stomachs were in knots as we laid in the dark trying to sleep. Stumbling back into the NICU at 5:30, I saw the echocardiogram being done. Negative for any heart defects or abnormalities, maybe this isn’t so bad after all. Talked with the neonatologist who then related that you had pulmonary hypertension, which could be very serious said you needed to be transferred to St. Luke’s in Allentown. Not so good now. An hour later I walked in again and watched them put the breathing tube down your trachea so you could be ventilated for transfer. They put you in a little plastic box. Now you had people all about you, and the tubes and IV’s were accumulating. You still didn’t look too bad, you looked like a good strong baby, nice and pink. We were both scared now though, and I called my dad and told him Augustine wasn’t doing very good. I had held it together pretty good until I talked to him.

We had two hours sleep, and your Mom had only given birth to you 12 hours earlier, but they let us go at 8:30 in the morning because we couldn’t stay there when you were somewhere else. 45 minute drive home to pick up some stuff and see Haven. Mom tried to get some sleep, but didn’t. We were both very tired and so very sad. We’re at home, without you. Haven makes us smile, as he did again and again the whole long month to follow. It was hard leaving Haven behind, but we needed to be near you and we piled into the car for a 50 minute drive to St. Luke’s in Allentown. We parked and Mom leans on me as we make our way to the NICU not knowing what to expect. It was a big NICU, little babies all around, but you were in one of the big rooms with a crowd around you. I knew you were sick, but when I saw you I knew you were really, really, sick. Now you were on nitrous oxide to help dilate the vessels to your lungs, and they were giving you dopamine and dobutamine to make that little heart work to push the blood to your lungs. Even with all that “help”, you looked very different than a few hours before. You were a waxy white pallor, a deathly shade of grey. We touched you, and you were so cold. You were pumped so full of drugs, you didn’t move, not even a little. We were crying now, you sweet beautiful boy.

We talked with God, that His Life would sustain you. I knew what had to be done now, I am your father, I have been called to watch over your soul. I told the nurse we were Catholic, and that we needed a priest, quickly. A good Father arrived about ten minutes later, a rectangular lapel pin identifying him as Fr. Fred Sattler.
He seemed a little awkward, and a little disheveled. He wore black suspenders. He looked like he was Amish, but the Roman collar didn’t lie. He asked for your name. “Augustine”, I replied. “How do you spell it”? he replied. “A-U-G-U-S-T-I-N-E, you know, like the Saint” I replied. Ex opere operato, thank God the Sacraments are not dependent on the holiness of the minister of the mysteries, or the their inability to spell the name of one of the greatest Western Fathers. He pulls out a blue bottle of sterile hospital water, and a little sea shell. In persona Christi he leads us through a shortened form of the Rite of Baptism, intoning “I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” as little droplets of water pour out of the shell and trickle behind your left ear. Sin, Death, and Hell have all been conquered here, the Light has pierced the darkness, a great victory has been won. Fr. Sattler then annoits your head with the chismating oil, confirming you thirteen years early. “I give them all the Sacraments I can” he states, God bless his soul. He gives us the seashell, the water, and the Rite of Baptism booklet. He leaves. A nurse walks in. “How do you spell his name again”? she asks, “Father needs to know”. I write it on a piece of paper. We return to your bed. The Communion of Saints is very real to me now. St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. John of the Cross, St. Mary Magdelene, St. Padre Pio, Fr. Luigi Guisanni, St. Joseph, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, along with countless family and friends and people we’ve never met, are all praying with us to Jesus for your little life. There at the bedside I gave you to mother Mary, but that’s your uncle John’s fault, and that’s a story for another time since this comment is already destined to be misunderstood.

The neonatologist tells me you need to be transferred to Philadelphia, to be placed on an ECMO (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine to keep you alive, otherwise you will die. I ask him what your chances are on ECMO, and he thinks about 50/50. He’s already called the transport team, they are on their way up from Philly in an ambulence. They can’t fly you down today, too many storms.
They arrive an hour later, and I wonder how so many people could possibly fit in an ambulance. They transfer you into another little plastic box, we sign a bunch of papers about something, and you leave a little bit later. Mom leans on me again on the way to the car. As we pull out of the parking lot I’m thinking of what I would like your funeral to be like, and what it would be like to bury a baby. I feel even heavier now, but there is a peace, there has been a victory, you are safe from the Evil One.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, our third hospital in twelve hours. We make our way through the maze to the NICU. It is an impressive place. God uses modern medicine to accomplish His will, whether or not he is acknowleged by our self-sufficient, humanistic, and technological wonder-age. I see no conflict here, where he has endowed man with great gifts, in the instances when man is using these gifts to preserve life, especially of the little ones. The consent for the surgery is quickly explained as we arrive. The serious risks are explained, but there are no other options and I sign. We sit in the waiting room, dazed, watching the fireworks on TV on this most surreal of Fourth of July’s. Mom is crying, I’m blinking a lot. Other families in the little room can’t go see their babies because Augustine’s surgery is being performed in the same room next to their cribs. They give us glances of understanding. The Bowman’s tell us how they’ve been here a month. They found out their little daughter had CHARGE syndrome a week after she was born. She likely can’t see, can’t hear, can’t taste, can’t smell, and can’t feel touch on her face. The other couple in the room had their little Evan rushed in a week after he was born as he was going into heart failure. Evidently he had an anerysm of the vein of Gallen in his brain, shunting too much blood to his heart leading to heart failure. The doctors had threaded a catheder into a vein in his leg, all the way to his brain, and occluded several veins. I guess it was successful, and he was doing well. Wow, here was a whole new world we never knew existed, suffering families with sick babies. Those two families were a great comfort, and we saw them often over the next few weeks.

We had no place to stay, so the NICU let us stay in a room right in the unit. We layed down in bed again, and tried to sleep as we awaited the knock on the door signifying that the surgeon wanted to speak to us. An hour later he knocked, and explained that it was difficult to get the cannulas into the arteries and vein in Augustine’s neck, but the surgery was successful. He said you were one of the sickest kids in the hospital right then. We went to go to see you, and saw the three large plastic tubes exiting your neck with blood flowing through them. Ventilator on one side, ECMO machine on the other. The machine was now doing almost all the work, pumping the blood and oxygenating it. You looked so good now, pink again. The machine whirring in the background was a strange comforting sound. The greatest risk at this point was a significant bleed in the brain. You already had a Grade I bleed, probably from delivery, and now with your blood being thinned to run it through the machine, this bleed worsening was a very real possibility. If you began to bleed, we needed to make decisions, decisions we didn’t know how to make, decisions we didn’t want to make. Now we could only wait, and pray, and wait, and pray.

So we prayed. Some extemporaneous prayers, which were spontaneous, and which God doubtlessly honors, but which were only grounded in our seemingly distant selves. So we prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet many, many times.

“Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Dearly Beloved Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.”

“For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

“Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

Concluding: “Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.”

So we cast ourselves on the one whose name is Mercy, to give us this day our daily bread.

Days pass, and you swell up from the inflammatory process of your body reacting to the machine that is saving your life. You look kind of fat, as if you were a few months old, with little distinguishing features left apparent. We couldn’t move you at all. We stare at the monitors and watch your vital signs-- blood pressure, respiratory rate, heart rate, oxygen saturation. They never change much, but watching them is an impossible addiction for me. We can only whisper to you, touch your head, your hand, and your leg. You’re sedated, but occasionally move when we touch you. Good news, no bleeding in your brain. Every day seems to bring a new hurdle though, from one lung refusing to inflate, to possible seizures, from the flow stopping in one of the cannulas draining blood, to the machine needing to be changed. But finally you look like your improving, it is day 10 and they say it is time for you to be removed from the ECMO machine. Now it is time for you to do it on your own, with only ventilator support. They take you off, and you remain stable. They start weaning you off the ventilator, and you do really well. No more ventilator after three days, only oxygen through the nose. You only needed that for another day, then you breathe room air like the rest of us. We can finally hold you, and we do, gingerly at first. You like to open your dark blue eyes and look around a lot. The swelling is gone and you look like a little peanut, you are our little peanut with a worried furrowed brow.

Now you have feeding issues. You improve slowly, and get transferred out of the NICU to an Integrated Care Unit. It is disconcerting, you don’t have two nurses caring for you around the clock like you did in the NICU. Its just you, alone in a big room. Mom can’t stand to leave you here alone, they’ll just let you cry in this place. So she stays overnight, every night. She also runs back to the Ronald McDonald House to see your older brother who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. My sister Debbie and I are taking care of him as best we can. Debbie is the best, and I know were not the only one’s who think so.

They tell us you can leave Thursday, August 3rd, exactly one month after you were born. We pack up, and carry you out to the car where you belong. You are really coming home. Back to Ronald McDonald House to check out, pack up a months worth of junk and find ourselves in a massive traffic jam on the way home. It is still very stressful. We hope your gaining weight, today we are begin to weigh you every morning and night. We love you so much, especially your little worried peanut face. We pray you will be a great man of God, that many hardened sinners would be converted to Our Lord because of you. For this we all pray. Amen.

2006-08-05T23:12:00.000-04:00

Augustine- Just Born

2006-08-05T23:10:00.001-04:00

Augustine's First Snuggle Just After Birth

2006-08-05T23:10:00.000-04:00

St. Luke's Allentown- Right Before Transfer to Philly

2006-08-05T23:09:00.000-04:00

Augustine on ECMO

2006-08-05T23:08:00.000-04:00

Augustine on the ECMO machine

2006-08-05T23:06:00.000-04:00

Grandma Visits in NICU

2006-08-05T23:05:00.000-04:00

Augustine In the Integrated Care Unit

2006-08-05T23:04:00.000-04:00

Ready to Go Home

2006-08-05T23:03:00.000-04:00

Peanut on the Couch

VICTORY

2006-06-15T22:03:00.000-04:00

What a nice coincidence as I celebrate the American Bishops passage of the new missal translation with a Victory Lager that has been sitting in the fridge for just such an occasion.
The new translation will not appear for 2-3 more years, waiting impatiently. The current translation is mediocre, and I'm being generous.

It is reported:

"On the vote for the translation of the Missale Romanum, the ayes were 173, the nays 29.

On the adaptations to the Missale Romanum for the United States, the ayes were 184, the nays 8.

Needing 168 votes to pass, the translation has passed."

It seems the good English Bishop of Leeds may have convinced a number of fence sitters in his wonderfully rich speech to the Bishops prior to the vote. He especially nailed Bishop Trautman (a liturgical revisionist spewing criticisms to the press lately) to the wall as he made those complaints look very foolish against the backdrop of the Scriptural and Patristic theology of the liturgy. His text is as follows:

"First of all I should like to thank you for this kind invitation to join you today. It is an honour to be here, and I sincerely hope that my small contribution to your debate will be of some assistance. It will not be possible to address every issue, but I will endeavour to address those issues that seem to be of concern. We have all have heard the old chestnut, ‘What is the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?, butt I had no idea at all when I was elected chairman of ICEL, four years ago, that what, at first, seemed to me to be a reasonably straight-forward task would be the forum for such controversy. What a shame it would be if the most important tool we have for formation and worship was reduced to politics, as if the highest or only form of discourse we can manage in the Church (or society) is political discourse.

I stand before you, as you know, as the representative of 11 bishops who themselves represent 11 countries, including your own. The Order of Mass now before you is the fruit of our work. I should like to take this opportunity of thanking you, the bishops of the United States, for your involvement in this work. You have sent us a huge quantity of comments on the successive drafts that we have offered you. Indeed, the notable scholarship from among the members of your own Conference has greatly contributed to and enhanced this whole project. ICEL has done its best to take all your comments and observations into account and produce a version that will respond to your wishes.

At the same time we have also been listening to comments from bishops of our other ten member countries as well as the directives of the Holy See, particularly those expressed in Liturgiam authenticam. But all of that you are aware of, because you yourselves approved our statutes when ICEL was being reconstituted four years ago. Needless to say, those statutes included working under the guidance of Liturgiam authenticam.

I have sometimes wondered, as we have progressed this work, how is it possible to respond to so many voices? Indeed, how can we produce a single version of the Roman Order of Mass for use in so many countries? Does not the English spoken in the United States differ so much from that spoken in, say, New Zealand, that we need more than one version of the Missal?

I am also aware from some of the comments that we have received from you that within the United States itself there is already considerable, well-documented linguistic variation. Some of you will speak of soda, some will say pop, and others will say cola; with their drink some will eat a hoagy, some a grinder some a hero and some, to the astonishment of British ears, a submarine! I would guess that there is not a person in this room who cannot tell his own story about a Southerner visiting the North who was unable to make himself understood. In my own country it is often the other way round – the people in the South tend to find those of us from the North unintelligible. You, too, may be more appreciative of that by the time I get to the end of this address!

These examples, of course, do not indicate that the United States is a modern Tower of Babel. Far from it. Alongside the regional variations there is an American Standard English by means of which people from all over the country communicate with each other. Its use is reinforced by Television and Radio.

I noticed that in the early stages of our consultation on the Order of Mass, voices were raised in the South objecting to the use of ‘you all’ in the priest’s greeting because of the way in which those words are used in the South. Later, this objection was not heard, presumably because one linguistic area cannot determine the language of the whole country: ‘you all’ is not used in American Standard English as it is used in the South and, as far as I am aware, nobody suggested that the South should have its own separate Missal.

The same principle can be applied internationally. There is an International Standard English, which we encounter when we buy a piece of equipment with instructions in many languages and only one English version.

Research on regional variation in English tends to show that the common ground among the regions is far greater than differences between them. English is still a single language. One of the leading linguistic scholars of our time, David Crystal, has written this:

It is difficult to predict the shape of international English in the twenty-first century. But it seems likely that more rather than less standardization will result . . . We may, in due course, all need to be in control of two standard Englishes - the one which gives us our national and local identity, and the other which puts us in touch with the rest of the human race. In effect, we may all need to become bilingual in our own language.1

Does this sound familiar, I wonder? Fifteen hundred years ago, Latin continued to be used while the Romance languages were growing out of it. Moreover, Latin became a vehicle of culture and faith for those who spoke Germanic languages. It was by means of Latin that the faith was preserved and transmitted in Western Europe. It needs to be remembered now that in many parts of the world it is English that will be called upon to play a similar rôle.

Also in many countries where English is not much spoken, the English version of liturgical texts plays an important function, because it is used as a guide to translating the Latin. There are, of course, some languages with speakers or scholars fluent in Latin. For instance, in New Zealand earlier this year I met a scholar who is translating the Mass from Latin directly into Fijian. In Maynooth, Ireland, a team is at work translating Latin texts directly into Gaelic. But in Norway and many parts of Africa and Asia, for instance, the translators rely heavily on the English version. I imagine that may be the case here, too, when the Mass is translated into Native American languages. We clearly have a responsibility to these people. At a meeting of the Presidents of English-speaking Episcopal Conferences in Rome, in October 2003, many Episcopal Conferences requested ICEL to share with them our scholarship in order to help them with their own translations. This is readily made available.

I often hear it said that objections to ICEL’s recent work are really objections to Liturgiam authenticam. Allow me to offer you a few thoughts on that document which is welcomed by some and rejected by others rather like the annual government budgets. It is to be remembered, however, that Liturgiam authenticam is a child of Pope John Paul II’s document Vigesimus quintus annus, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sacrosanctum concilium, which called for an opportune stock-taking, not least in the area of faithfulness in translation.

Its stipulations differ markedly from those of the earlier document known as Comme le prévoit. That was issued in 1969 by the Consilium with the responsibility for putting into effect the Council’s Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium. We need to note, however, that these two documents do not have the same status: the earlier document was issued by the Consilium, the latter by the Congregation. At the heart of Comme le prévoit was the idea of ‘dynamic equivalence’, achieved when a translator detaches the ‘content’ of an utterance from the ‘form’ in which it is expressed.

We have an examples of this in our current Mass-texts. For example, in the Third Eucharistic prayer when we say so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made. The proponents of dynamic equivalence tell us that from east to west conveys the same information as from the rising of the sun to its setting’, which we now propose. And so it does, in the dry language of the cartographer. But the meaning of this phrase is richer: it has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. We could have made both meanings explicit by saying from east to west and from dawn to dusk, but I would claim that by staying closer to the form of expression that we find in Malachi 1:11, and I quote:

See, from the rising of the sun to its setting all the nations revere my Name and everywhere incense is offered to my Name as well as a pure offering.

-we have produced a richer and more evocative version, bringing to the mind of the worshipper the beauties of the sunrise and sunset and the closeness of these texts to Sacred Scripture.

Another example is found in the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer in the phrase the fruit of the vine in the Institution Narrative. Currently we say he took the cup filled with wine, as you know, and some argue that the fruit of the vine means the same as the single word wine, and that the simpler expression should be preferred. But we hear the words the fruit of the vine on the lips of the Lord himself in all three synoptic Gospels – which I would consider as being more than enough reason to respect their form. Moreover, though the two expressions refer to the same substance, they do so in an entirely different way. The difference between the single word and the richer phrase is the difference between reading the label on the bottle and actually enjoying a glass-full of the wine itself. Furthermore this phrase has a powerful salvific resonance because of the symbolic value accorded to the vine plant and the vineyard in scripture, as recalled by Jesus’ elaboration in John 15 of the image of Himself as the true vine, His Father as the vinedresser, and ourselves as the branches. This picks up on an even earlier usage in Isaiah 5 – the famous “Song of the Vineyard” - and the Lord’s lament at the degeneracy of his once choice vine in Jeremiah 2. Of course, the word wine connects with this scriptural patrimony, but it does so less evidently, less directly than does the phrase fruit of the vine which, upon each hearing, encourages us in our imaginations to see the particular Eucharistic event as part of the unfolding of God’s universal plan within history to rescue us from the destruction and chaos occasioned by our sinfulness and bring us into communion with Himself and with each other in Christ.

Dynamic equivalence has become an outmoded idea: even its originator, Eugene Nida, ceased to use it in his later writings. Over the last thirty years specialists in language have become more aware that the form we choose for an utterance is itself expressive of our purpose in speaking. This is particularly important when we make requests. It is one thing for me to say turn on the light and another for me to say would you turn on the light? Both utterances convey the information that I want the light to be turned on by you. But we speak not only to inform, but also to persuade.

Much of our liturgical language consists of requests made to God. Sometimes, these are expressed very simply and directly, as in the Collect for the first Friday of Advent:

Stir up your power, O Lord, and come to our aid with mighty strength . . . (A22co)

But some are more elaborately expressed, as in the Collect for Tuesday of the same week:

Be moved by our pleading, Lord God, we pray, and in our trialsgrant us the help of your compassion . . . (A12co)

This might be called the ‘courtesy’ of the Missal. Liturgiam authenticam, insisting that translators respect the forms of expression found in the Liturgy, encourages us to speak humbly and courteously to God. But forms of courtesy vary from region to region: you know, for instance, how bishops are addressed differently in different countries. Courteous requests are often made in the form of questions like would you turn on the light? which do not seem appropriate for the Liturgy, since while Hebrew prayers often ask questions of God, Latin ones do not. In consequence, deprecatory language, which is necessary for a faithful translation of the Liturgy, does not come readily to hand. Translators have found that they need to stay close to the Latin in order to remain faithful to it, and users of these texts will be learning a new language of liturgical prayerful courtesy.

Often, the form of a liturgical utterance will convey a doctrinal message. An important instance of this is the link between the Epiclesis and the Institution Narrative in the Eucharistic Prayers. In the First and Second Eucharistic Prayers, these form a single syntactic unit. In the Third and Fourth they are joined by the conjunction enim, which we have translated with the English word for. For example, in the third Eucharistic Prayer:

Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you: make holy by the same Spirit these gifts we have brought to you for consecration, that they may become the Body and Bloodof your Son our Lord Jesus Christ at whose command we celebrate these mysteries. For he himself on the night he was handed over took bread …

It seemed imperative to respect the form of the Latin text in order to show a link between the action of the Holy Spirit and the action of Christ.

‘Formal equivalence’ is the name often given to the goal recommended in Liturgiam authenticam. Its methods need to be used carefully and flexibly, and we have tried not to use them slavishly. The Holy Father himself is reported as saying recently that the purpose of Liturgiam authenticam is not to produce a word-for-word translation, but a faithful translation. And that is what we have tried to do.

I often share with my brother English and Welsh bishops an insight that I have gained through being involved with this work. It is this, and I say it with the greatest respect, but the more I go through this process the clearer it is to me that very many of us need to revisit the theological reasoning behind the various parts and components of the Mass, as well as considering the theological sources from which the texts of the Mass have been culled. In the main, these are the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church.

In this regard I would like to make a general point, but one I believe to be highly important for our consideration. The prayers of the Mass, including the Anaphoras, are mainly inspired and formed from Sacred Scripture, and the Commission of ICEL has accepted one very important point found in Liturgiam authenticam and accepted it as being crucial, namely the significance of the language of Sacred Scripture in our translation of the Mass. One good example of this is the translation of the Domine non sum dignus as, Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, with its reminiscence of the Centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant.2

The link between the Liturgy and Scripture, on which Liturgiam authenticam lays emphasis, seems so obvious, important and valuable. I find it quite interesting to note the issues that can arise in this regard. Let me take one example, the use of the word dew in the Epiclesis of the Second Eucharistic Prayer:

Therefore, make holy these gifts, we pray, by the dew of your Spirit . . .

It has been objected that this translation ‘does not resonate or communicate with contemporary Christians’. But surely, dew still exists. I noticed an advert on the street yesterday for a drink called Mountain Dew! Dew has a unique set of natural and scriptural associations: it speaks of freshness, new beginning, water (and hence life), beauty, descent from above (and hence divine blessing), and manna (Exodus 16:13-14) (and hence Eucharist). It still appears on the ground in the morning as it did in the time of Moses on the journey through the desert. American people know what dew is - rather better, I suspect, than Europeans, since so many of you get out of bed earlier than we do! It is true that in some pronunciations, dew can be confused with the word for a Hebrew person, but I am unaware of any representations from the Anti-defamation League objecting to the frequent use of the expression ‘dew point’ in the weather forecast! Contemporary Christians are not puzzled when they hear at Mass these words from the Book of Exodus:

In the morning a dew lay all about the camp (Ex 16:13)

Or when they hear Isaac say to Jacob in Genesis:

May God give to you of the dew of the heavens (Gn 27:28)

Or when they hear Elijah prophesy:

during these years there shall be no dew or rain except at my word (1 Kgs 17:1)

We do not scratch our heads when in the Liturgy of the Hours we make our own the words of Moses:

(May) my discourse permeate like the dew (Deut 32:2)

Or when with the Psalmist we compare unity

to the dew of Hermon coming down upon the mountains of Zion (Ps 133:3).

In the New American Bible, from which I have taken all these examples, the word ‘dew’ occurs 41 times, all of them in the Old Testament.

Christian writers developed the idea of the ‘dew of the Spirit’. Saint Ambrose gives that name to the waters of baptism, while for later writers such as Saint Bernard, the dew of the Spirit is the grace of God which descends upon the soul to nourish and enliven it. Hildegard of Bingen says that the dew of the Spirit came down on the Apostles on the day of Pentecost. And indeed on both sides of the Atlantic most of us will have heard sung or said the Sequence of Pentecost which rendered riga quod est aridum by translating the stanza thus:

Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness pour your dew; Wash the stains of guilt away.3

That same day, in the Office of Readings, we read in the text from St Irenaeus:

If we are not to be scorched and made unfruitful, we need the dew of God. Since we have our accuser, we need an Advocate as well.4

Forgive me if I have laboured this point, but I do so simply to exemplify how a reasonably commonplace and simple word can sometimes be embroidered with a complexity it does not merit.

Finally, let me consider with you the translation of et cum spiritu tuo. As you know, the translation of this as and with your spirit is required by Liturgiam authenticam. However, this translation cannot be understood without reference to St Paul, who will often address a person, for example Timothy, by referring to your spirit rather than simply to you. What is the significance of this? Well, he is addressing someone close to God who has God’s spirit. So when we reply and with your spirit we are indicating that we are part of a spiritual community, it is God’s spirit that has gathered us together. A further point that I would like to make with you, which resonates with many of the interventions at the recent Synod of Bishops, is that scriptural catechesis is central to liturgical catechesis. It was said of St Bernard that he knew the Sacred Scriptures so well that his language was biblical – he began to, as our young people would say today, 'speak bible.' My point is that in using a translation that is more faithful to Sacred Scripture we are teaching ourselves and our people to speak bible! Lex orandi, lex credendi.

I was taken recently by an article in one of our Catholic weeklies at home. In fact, I was more taken aback by it. It presented to its readers the 100 most influential Catholics in Britain today. Needless to say there wasn’t a bishop amongst them! The following week, in the Letters’ column, a woman wrote in saying:

You left my mum off your list! For me, she is the top Catholic in the country. She has attended Mass faithfully at least once a week for over 83 years. She sacrificed a good career (as a midwife) to raise eight children and she’s now a devoted grandmother and great-grandmother. She has given very generously to every collection in our parish, sometimes going without herself. Both her and my late father served the Church faithfully for years, never questioning [and this, to me, was the pertinent phrase] and always listening to the words spoken from the altar. Her name is Anne and she is like thousands of Catholic mums in this country, the very backbone of the Church.

I cannot help but think that what is being asked of us bishops today is no less vital than what was being asked of Paul when, in the face of the cacophonous Church at Corinth, he wrote:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.5

So many people with so many ideas, but in the end it is we bishops, in union with our Holy Father, who have the responsibility of faithfully handing on to them what we have received from the Lord. Paul returned to that theme once again, when writing to Timothy:

Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.6

The version of Mass that we currently use is clearly far from perfect. Those of you who celebrate Mass in both Spanish and English will know only too well the difference in richness between the two texts. The then bishops of ICEL recognised that from the beginning, and they knew that a revision would be needed. There was an urgent feeling in the early 1970s that the liturgy should be made available to the people as soon as possible, and the work was rushed. The revisiting of this was delayed for practical reasons, but also for ideological ones that caused many bishops grave concern, and that is sometimes forgotten. The chief preoccupation in many minds was, of course, that the liturgy be brought closer to the people. This aim could, and sometimes did, obscure the other aim, which was to preserve and transmit our inherited liturgical tradition and bring our people closer to that. During the initial stages of consultation on the third edition of the Missale Romanum, two theologians wrote to me, quite independently, and shared with me their belief that the Mass texts we currently use had severely diminished our appreciation of the richness of Eucharistic theology. This is clearly something to which we, as bishops, should be sensitive. The Holy Father said something similar during the course of last year’s Synod of Bishops. Of course, if you try to carry a cup of coffee across a room too quickly, much of the contents may spill. This time, we have tried to keep the coffee in the cup.

We are at a very important moment in the whole of this process. If the bishops of the English-speaking countries can agree on a single version of the Mass, what a sign of catholicity that will be. But more than that, it will be a guarantee of catholicity for the future, not only in our own time, and not only in our own countries. Clearly I, and all my brother bishops of ICEL, believe that you, the bishops of the United States, have a most important role of leadership to play in just that. Thank you for giving me your attention.

1. Quoted in Tom McArthur, Oxford Guide to World English (Oxford, 2002), 445.
2. Mt 8:8; Lk 7:6
3. Lava quod est sordidum, Riga quod est aridum, Sana quod est saucium
4. Contra Haereses Lib.3,17,1-3:SC34,302-306
5. I Corinthians 11:23-24
6. 2 Timothy 2:14-15

2006-05-21T21:14:00.000-04:00

Wistfully Outdoors

2006-05-21T21:13:00.000-04:00

Haven and Friend watching EH-MO!

2006-05-21T21:04:00.000-04:00

St. Joseph's and a Random Rainbow

2006-05-21T21:03:00.000-04:00

Front- Looking Up

2006-05-21T21:02:00.000-04:00

High Altar St. Joseph's- Easter

Been Gone Awhile

2006-05-21T20:42:00.000-04:00

Between Lent, the move south, and working on a website for our church I haven't felt too inspired to post here. I probably continue to post rather sporatically as I start a new job in 6 weeks and baby #2 will be here soon thereafter.

I love Jim Thorpe (the town). Here are a few pictures of the Church of St. Joseph, a block from our house. It seems like a good place to try to encourage "the reform of the reform" of the Liturgy that Bendict XVI speaks of. The building was built by German immigrants in the 1870's (thank God for the Germans), and the interior was left essentially intact following Vatican II. Hopefully the souls of all us Catholics in this church will be transformed that we will be as beautiful interiorly as the building we worship in every week.

The current priest is younger, expounds the Scriptures, and uses incense liberally, chants the Mass, and all the hymns are accompanied by pipe organ (no folk Masses). I haven't yet introduced myself personally to thank him for his care of the Liturgy, but I intend to this week.

Hopefully you guys (John, Matt, Scott, Jeremiah, ...) can make it down (or up) sometime.

Reformanda vs. Renovanda

2006-05-21T20:32:00.000-04:00

Here is a post by a guy named Edwin, an Anglican, who is one of the three (I'm sure there are others) non-Catholic Christians I have noted on the internet who I highly respect. The other two are Tim Enloe and Rev. Michael Pahls. I thought this was a great post, so I copied it over here. His blog is at http://stewedrabbit.blogspot.com/, although he doesn't post much (I don't think he has much time.)

Reformanda vs. Renovanda

Here I go again after another of my long lapses. I'm not going to become king of the blogosphere at this rate, but that's OK.

An online acquaintance of mine, Tim Enloe, asked me a few weeks ago to expand a remark I once made to the effect that the Church is not "semper reformanda" (always to be reformed) but rather "semper renovanda" (always to be renewed).

Here's what I mean by this.

"Semper reformanda" asserts that one must, from time to time, question the doctrines and structures that have already been established. They must be compared with Scripture (and/or previous non-Scriptural Christian tradition) and revised or even discarded as needed. The underlying assumption is that the Church progresses into a fuller understanding and experience of the faith by a continual process of questioning and reformulation. There's an intrinsic paradox here--on the one hand Scripture is the standard of perfection by which all tradition must be judged, while on the other hand a fully adult form of Christianity beckons from the future. Emphasize the first half of this paradox, and you have fundamentalism; emphasize the second, and you have liberalism. Mainstream, historic Protestantism stands in a fruitful tension between the two. Often, the Reformation of the 16th century takes a secondary place next to Scripture as the archetypal act of reform--in old-fashioned Protestant circles any attempt to "reform the reform" in the light of pre-Reformation traditions is likely to be met with outraged protest. Sometimes a similar status is given to the patristic era, or parts thereof; and sometimes even aspects of medieval Christianity are seen as important steps in the development of a fully mature, and hence fully reformed, Christianity (Anselm's atonement theology, for instance).

So the position I'm describing does not exclude a respect for the past and for tradition. In this it contrasts with the "restorationist" position which believes it can sweep away the past entirely and reconstruct the New Testament Church. (I'm sure my good friend thoughtspot is going to protest that this is a caricature, and maybe it is. I'll let thoughtspot make the case!) There's a lot to be said for the "semper reformanda" slogan. Clearly any orthodox form of Christianity must maintain Scripture as the norma normans, the ultimate standard that regulates all doctrine and practice. (And yes, that means that the Council of Trent is only orthodox insofar as it can be interpreted so as to allow Scripture to remain the norma normans.) And just as clearly, the Church does stray from time to time--even if it doesn't declare false dogmas, at the very least it tends to overemphasize one thing or another, or deemphasize some vital point of Christian discipleship, and has to be brought back.

Here's the question, though: does this re-centering of the Church around the Gospel take place primarily through the restructuring of institutions and the reformulation of dogmas? And does it involve the rejection of the past, even in a partial sense?

The "semper renovanda" position I'm arguing would answer no to both these questions. Yes, restructuring of doctrines and institutions is needed from time to time. But historically, these restructurings generally create as many problems as they solve. Real progress takes place, I believe, when Christians learn to live more deeply into what they have been given. Any restructuring necessary proceeds from this inner renewal, and when reformation works the other way around it doesn't work very well. Do away with the papacy and you deliver yourself into the hands of the civil government. Free the laity from priests and you subject them to the far worse tyranny of scholars. Reject indulgences and you wind up with a forensic doctrine of justification that describes Christ's redeeming work in terms of the same kind of account-book juggling engaged in by the indulgence sellers.

Insofar as the Reformation was a truly positive force in Christian history, it was a movement of evangelical renewal focused on the message of forgiveness through faith in Christ. But as Catholics are discovering today (Fr. Cantalemessa's sermon before the Pope a few months ago is the most striking example) , this is not necessarily incompatible with Catholicism. The evangelical message per se did not need to split the Church. (Indeed, David Bagchi and others have pointed out that the earliest opponents of Luther did not single his doctrine of justification out as heretical. Only after Luther had been announcing for years that justification by faith destroyed the structures of the Papacy did the champions of the Papacy start to believe him.)

I don't fault Luther for linking the evangelical message to a reform program. Reform was indeed needed. Indeed, I don't have the heart to blame Luther and the other early Reformers. I understand why they saw the Papacy as a foul parasite on the Church's life. I understand why they saw the material piety of the later Middle Ages as rank superstition. I understand why they thought true renewal could only come through sweeping away scholasticism and pilgrimages and all the paraphernalia of late medieval Catholicism. But I think history has proven them wrong. Indeed, some aspects of Catholicism began to creep back as early as the 1530s. Scholastic philosophy was entrenched once again in Protestantism by the later 16th century. The "tyranny" ascribed by the Reformers to the Papacy was nothing compared to the tyranny exercised by civil authorities over the Church--often because the Protestants had handed over control to the "magistrate."

This is why "semper reformanda" is a trap when it becomes the central program of the Church. Sweep the dust away and it will start settling again immediately. Dusting is one of the duties of life (though I do it far too seldom). But if we spend all our time dusting the house we will never enjoy it. And our problems will only get worse if we decide the furniture is bad every time it gets covered with dust. We'll bankrupt ourselves and fill our lives with chaos trying to get new furniture all the time. The sensible approach is to dust as needed and accept the fact that cleanliness will never be perfect. We need to live in the house rather than always trying to make it perfectly clean.

The Semi-Pelegian Narrower Catechism

2006-05-21T20:21:00.000-04:00

This was one of the funniest things I have read in awhile.

The Semi-Pelagian Narrower Catechism

1. Q: What is the chief end of each individual Christian?
A: Each individual Christian's chief end is to get saved. This is the first and great commandment.

2. Q: And what is the second great commandment?
A: The second, which is like unto it, is to get as many others saved as he can.

3. Q: What one work is required of thee for thy salvation?
A: It is required of me for my salvation that I make a Decision for Christ, which meaneth to accept Him into my heart to be my personal lord'n'saviour

4. Q: At what time must thou perform this work?
A: I must perform this work at such time as I have reached the Age of Accountability.

5. Q: At what time wilt thou have reached this Age?
A: That is a trick question. In order to determine this time, my mind must needs be sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce even to the division of bone and marrow; for, alas, the Age of Accountability is different for each individual, and is thus unknowable.

6. Q: By what means is a Decision for Christ made?
A: A Decision for Christ is made, not according to His own purpose and grace which was given to me in Christ Jesus before the world began, but according to the exercise of my own Free Will in saying the Sinner's Prayer in my own words.

7. Q: If it be true then that man is responsible for this Decision, how then can God be sovereign?A: He cannot be. God sovereignly chose not to be sovereign, and is therefore dependent upon me to come to Him for salvation. He standeth outside the door of my heart, forlornly knocking, until such time as I Decide to let Him in.

8. Q: How then can we make such a Decision, seeing that the Scripture saith, we are dead in our trespasses and sins?
A: By this the Scripture meaneth, not that we are dead, but only that we are sick or injured in them.

9. Q: What is the assurance of thy salvation?
A: The assurance of thy salvation is, that I know the date on which I prayed the Sinner's Prayer, and have duly written this date on an official Decision card.

10. Q: What is thy story? What is thy song?
A: Praising my Savior all the day long.

11. Q: You ask me how I know he lives?
A: He lives within my heart.

12. Q: And what else hast thou got in thine heart?
A: I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

13. Q: Where??
A: Down in my heart!

14. Q: Where???
A: Down in my heart!!

15. Q: What witness aid hath been given us as a technique by which we may win souls?
A: The tract known commonly as the Four Spiritual Laws, is the chief aid whereby we may win souls.

16. Q: What doth this tract principally teach?
A: The Four Spiritual Laws principally teach, that God's entire plan for history and the universe centereth on me, and that I am powerful enough to thwart His divine purpose if I refuse to let Him pursue His Wonderful Plan for my life.

17. Q: What supplementary technique is given by which we may win souls?
A: The technique of giving our own Personal Testimony, in the which we must always be ready to give an answer concerning the years we spent in vanity and pride, and the wretched vices in which we wallowed all our lives untilthe day we got saved.

18. Q: I'm so happy, what's the reason why?
A: Jesus took my burden all away!

19. Q: What are the means given whereby we may save large crowds of souls in a spectacular manner?
A: Such a spectacle is accomplished by means of well-publicized Crusades and Revivals which (in order that none may be loath to attend) are best conducted anywhere else but in a Church.

20. Q: Am I a soldier of the Cross?
A: I am a soldier of the Cross if I join Campus Crusade, Boys' Brigade, the Salvation Army, or the Wheaton Crusaders; of if I put on the helmet of Dispensationalism, the breastplate of Pietism, the shield of Tribulationism, and the sword of Zionism, having my feet shod with the gospel of Arminianism.

21. Q: Who is your boss?A: My boss is a Jewish carpenter.

22. Q: Hath God predestined vessels of wrath to Hell?
A: God hath never performed such an omnipotent act, for any such thing would not reflect His primary attribute, which is Niceness.

23. Q: What is sanctification?
A: Sanctification is the work of my free Will, whereby I am renewed by having my Daily Quiet Time.

24. Q: What rule hath God for our direction in prayer?
A: The rule that we must bow our hands, close our heads, and fold our eyes.

25. Q: What doth the Lord's Prayer teach us?
A: The Lord's Prayer teacheth us that we must never memorize a prayer, or use one that hath been written down.

26. Q: What's the book for thee?
A: The B-I-B-L-E.

27. Q: Which are among the first books which a Christian should read to his soul's health?
A: Among the first books which a Christian should read are the books of Daniel and Revelation, and The Late Great Planet Earth.

28. Q: Who is on the Lord's side?
A: He who doth support whatsoever is done by the nation of Israel, and who doth renounce the world, the flesh, and the Catholic Church.

29. Q: What are the seven deadly sins?
A: The seven deadly sins are smoking, drinking, dancing, card-playing, movie-going, baptizing babies, and having any creed but Christ.

30. Q: What is a sacrament?
A: A sacrament is an insidious invention devised by the Catholic Church whereby men are drawn into idolatry.

31. Q: What is the Lord's Supper?
A: The Lord's Supper is a dispensing of saltines and grape juice, in the which we remember Christ's command to pretend that they are His body and blood.

32. Q: What is baptism?
A: Baptism is the act whereby, by the performance of something that seems quite silly in front of everyone, I prove that I really, really mean it.

33. Q: What is the Church?
A: The Church is the tiny minority of individuals living at this time who have Jesus in their hearts, and who come together once a week for a sermon, fellowship and donuts.

34. Q: What is the office of the keys?
A: The office of the keys is that office held by the custodian.

35. Q: What meaneth "The Priesthood Of All Believers"?
A: The Priesthood Of All Believers meaneth that there exists no authority in the Church, as that falsely thought to be held by elders, presbyters, deacons, and bishops, but that each individual Christian acts as his own authority in all matters pertaining to the faith.

36. Q: Who is the Holy Spirit?
A: The Holy Spirit is a gentleman Who would never barge in.

37. Q: How long hath the Holy Spirit been at work?
A: The Holy Spirit hath been at work for more than a century: expressly, since the nineteenth-century Revitalization brought about by traveling Evangelists carrying tents across America.

38. Q: When will be the "Last Days" of which the Bible speaketh?
A: The "Last Days" are these days in which we are now living, in which the Antichrist, the Beast, and the Thief in the Night shall most certainly appear.

39. Q: What is the name of the event by which Christians will escape these dreadful entities?
A: The event commonly known as the Rapture, in the which it is our Blessed Hope that all cars driven by Christians will suddenly have no drivers.

40. Q: When is Jesus coming again?A: Maybe morning, maybe noon, maybe evening, and maybe soon.

41. Q: When the roll, roll, roll, is called up yonder, where will you be?
A: There.

42. Q: Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!
A: Praise ye the Lord!

43. Q: Praise ye the Lord!
A: Hallelujah!

44. Q: Where will we meet again?
A: Here, there, or in the air.

45. Q: Can I hear an Ay-men?
A: Ay-men.

2006-01-24T16:13:00.000-05:00

West Broadway. Pretty huh. We won't be living on this street.

2006-01-24T16:07:00.000-05:00

Downtown in Autumn

On The Road Again

2006-01-24T15:47:00.000-05:00

Sarah and I will be moving again by the grace of God within the next five months or so. I signed a contract for a job in southern Carbon County in Pennsylvania, a bit north of Allentown. If we are able to afford a house, we will try to live in the town of Jim Thorpe as this area is growing rather quickly and would likely be a good investment. Jim Thorpe is of course named after the great athlete. The town made some kind of deal with his wife that if he was buried there they'd change their town's name from Mauchunk to J.T. It's history, he's buried on a hill above town.

2006-01-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

Emaciated but not defeated

Do Yourself a Favor ...

2006-01-21T20:30:00.000-05:00

...And go rent "The Ninth Day". It may be one of the best movies you see this year. Bare, complex, human, transcendent. Basic plot--> A Catholic priest in the priest cell of Dachau concentration camp is released for nine days to try to convince his Bishop back home in Luxembourg to support the Nazi regime. Based on a true story, the film is about what unfolds during those nine days. In German with English subtitles, I give it nine stars *********

My Pet Topic

2006-01-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

Whenever I see an article on the West's impending population implosion I tend to post it on here. Do I find some sick satisfaction in the consequences of the abortive/contraceptive sex-as-recreation children-as-lifestyle-negation coming home to roost. Probably. I should be more troubled than I am because the reality will hurt-- all of us. But pain may cause us all to live the real reality with more clarity.

I hear much more about global warming than population decline. Why is this? Why the indifference? Are these cries of "Wolf, Wolf" from a minority or are the majority a bunch of feathered flightless birds with their heads in the sand? Well, this editorial is from the Wall Street Journal.

My favorite line: "Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat. "

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760

Little Labels

2006-01-02T12:20:00.000-05:00

In my short time as a Catholic, I have tried to interact with (at least superficially) different expressions of Catholicity. I was received into the Church through your average tepid American Catholic parish, chose to become a member of a "traditionalist" parish across town, will possibly attend a Byzantine Catholic parish after I move to another town for my new job, and have bounced around various orthodox Catholic and other Christian blogs.

In general, I loathe labels. There are more than a few at my current parish who revel in describing themselves as "traditional" Catholics. Others (not in my parish!) pride themselves in being "progressive" Catholics. This all seems quite silly to me, and for myself I prefer simply to refer to myself as a Catholic Christian.

However, I have found myself drawn to certain expressions of Catholicity. In particular, two more labels may be applied here: Ressourcement and Augustinian Thomism. The term ressourcement is generally descriptive of the calls of a not so cohesive group of theologians of the past century to "return to the sources" (primarily Scripture and the Fathers) for the renewal of the Catholic Church in the modern age. Through such a return to the sources, the Church could pursue an aggiornamento, or an updating of the disciplines, theology, and liturgical practices of the Church. Some of the ressourcement theologians would include: Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, Joseph Peiper, Msgr. Giusanni, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Danielou. These theologians had a great impact on Vatican II.

Following the Council, there was a struggle between two groups regarding the aggiornamento. These differences can be seen in two of the principle theological journals following the Council: Concilium (Kung, Schillebeeckx, et al) and Communio (Ratzinger, von Balthasar, et al). Following the Council, there was a rapid process of aggiornamento without the balance of an in-depth ressourcement to guide it, which led quite frankly to utter chaos.

Among those orthodox Catholics who appreciate the ressourcement theologians and look positively upon Vatican II, two groups also emerge. The "Whig Thomists" (similar to the neoconservative movement) and the "Augustinian Thomists". These two groups differ in how they view modern political and economic thought. You can read the links below regarding these two groups if you aren't completely disinterested by now.

So, for the sake of identifying myself with having sympathies for certain labelled expressions of orthodox Catholic thought I offer the following. I prefer the Ressourcement theologians to traditional Thomists or neo-Thomists, and I prefer Augustinian Thomism to Whig Thomism. So in a very real way J. Owen's Christmas gift of a book/poem by Charles Peguy for myself was a providentially perfect purchase.

Here are some websites that I have enjoyed over the past few months related to the Ressourcement theologians: http://ressourcement.blogspot.com
http://nouvelletheologie.blogspot.com/

A good article regarding Whig Thomists and Augustinian Thomists:
http://www.tcrnews2.com/Augustianian_Whig.html

2005-12-12T22:39:00.000-05:00

St. Elias

2005-12-12T22:38:00.000-05:00

St. Elias

2005-12-12T22:37:00.001-05:00

St. Elias

2005-12-12T22:37:00.000-05:00

Annunciation

2005-12-12T22:36:00.000-05:00

Annunciation

2005-12-12T22:35:00.000-05:00

Annunciation

Not So Ugly Churches

2005-12-12T21:07:00.000-05:00

To follow on the last post, here are some churches that exhibit an exhuberant reflection of their Christian Faith. The beauty of the Divine Life within bursts out into three dimensions to engage all the senses for the glory of the Triune God, the Creator of all that is true and beautiful.

These are both Byzantine Catholic Churches. Pictured are St. Elias the Prophet Ukrainian Catholic Church in Brampton, Canada (outside Toronto) and Annunciation of the Mother of God Byzantine Catholic Church in Homer Glen, Illinois. The Eastern Catholic Churches in the West have their own very unique struggles. Declining numbers in many areas of the country, strongly ethnic parishes not often integrating "outsiders", questions of identity, the need to reclaim lost traditions ... ... The hope for any renewal lies in a profound response to the reforms of Vatican II. The chaos and litugical disruption in the Latin Rite following Vatican II has not been generally experienced in the Eastern Churches. To the contrary many of the Eastern Churches have returned to the Eastern roots that they had lost through "Latinizations" over several centuries.

These two churches are exemplary of the positive fruit born out of Vatican II for the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Ugly Churches

2005-12-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

I wrote a little ditty on ugly churches a while back after I noted some of the same on Matt's blog. I came across this article and thought it would be a good read for any of you interested in architecture and its importance in reflecting theological realities.

http://communio-icr.com/articles/PDF/mcnamara32-1.pdf

As an aside, I changed the link below so you can hear that Byzantine Chant. Several paragraphs down on the St. Anthony's Monastery website you'll see "Click to here a sample of this music chanted ..." So click on it.

Chant For Dad

2005-11-23T21:41:00.000-05:00

My Dad was wearing thin with the drum-beats of contemporary Christian music (aren't we all). I promised an audio post to bring him back close to the heart of Christian music. Sorry, no Gospel quartets but this is the next best thing. Byzantine Chant is a continuation of the tradition of chant found within the Jewish Synagoges which were centered primarily on the chanting of Psalms. St. John of Damascus refined the forms of his day and wrote many hymns, and can be considered a father of Byzantine Chant as Gregory the Great is considered the father of Western (Gregorian) Chant.

The following audio link is from the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts from St. Anthony's Orthodox Monastery, and the chant is taken from the opening lines of Psalm 140:

"Let my prayer be set forth as incense before Thee, the lifting up of my hands, as an evening sacrifice."

http://www.stanthonysmonastery.org/music/IndexM.html
Click on the .mp3 link a few paragraphs down that states "click to hear a sample of this music chanted ..."

It may take a few minutes to download with dial-up.

Here's The Letter

2005-11-22T21:23:00.000-05:00

This probably won't make Gene very happy-----> http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=40891

Although this is simply a re-affirmation of the constant teaching of the Catholic Church, will anything actually change? The problem is not a lack of understanding of the Churchs' position, but a refusal to abide by it. Will the Diocese of Los Angeles or the Diocese of Rochechester actually listen to such a reaffirmation? I doubt it. And if they don't, and are not disciplined, what good is such a document anyway? The problem in dealing with the American Catholic Church continues. Too heavy a hand with discipline will likely end in significant open schism. Too leniant a hand allows dissedents to openly spread their heresies and causes great scandel to both those within and outside of the Church. I think the hammer needs to begin to fall. The scandel is too great. The damage to the Faith is too great. Open schism is a smaller price to pay, the lines are then clearly drawn. God help and strengthen Benedict XVI. God help and strengthen us all.

Dear Gene

2005-11-07T11:14:00.000-05:00

The first openly gay Anglican bishop, Gene Robinson, has called for the Roman Catholic church's attitude to homosexuals to be confronted. The Bishop of New Hampshire said the Vatican's ban on ordaining gay men was "vile", in a speech in London. He received a standing ovation after his speech, in which he spoke of how he had faced prejudice in his role. Some Anglican conservatives had called for the St-Martin-in-the-Fields church venue to be changed to a secular one.

"I am not here to grind any axes, I am here to do the thing that Christians do, that is to witness to the good of God."

"We are seeing so many Roman Catholics joining the church."
"Pope Ratzinger may be the best thing that ever happened to the Episcopal Church."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4411442.stm

Dear Gene,

We are seeing so many Episcopalians joining the Church. Gene Robinson may be the best thing that ever happened to the Catholic Church.

I'd trade a hundred rebellious dissenting Catholics (though I'd rather see them repent and convert) for one holy faithful Episcopalian. Fr. Bergman and about sixty other souls were received into full communion last week on the eve of All Saints here in Scranton. He mentions you in his letter of renunciation here ---> http://www.stthomasmoresociety.org/events/renounce.htm

So thanks buddy. I'm sure Pope Benedict will readily assuage your concerns. Look for a letter near the end of this month.

In Peace, Love, and Harmony,

Pete

Eucharistic Sacrifice- East and West, Ancient and Modern

2005-11-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

East-- St John Chrysostom "Homily 17 on Hebrews" Late 300's
Entire Text: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf114.v.xxi.html

"Do we not offer sacrifice daily? We do indeed, but as a memorial of his death and this oblation is single and not manifold. But how can it be one and not many? Because it has been offered once for all, as was the ancient sacrifice in the holy of holies. This is the figure of that ancient sacrifice, as indeed it was of this one; for it is the same Jesus Christ we offer always, not now one victim and later another. The victim is always the same, so that the sacrifice is one. Are we going to say that because Christ is offered in many places, there are many Christs? Of course not. It is one and the same Christ everywhere; he is here in his entirety, and there in his entirety, one unique body. Just as he is one body, not many bodies, although offered in many places, so the sacrifice is one and the same. Our high-priest is the very same Christ who has offered the sacrifice which cleanses us. The victim who was offered then, who cannot be consumed, is the self-same victim we offer now. “What we do is done as a memorial of what was done then.” We do not offer a different sacrifice, but always the same one 'or rather we accomplish the memorial of it.'"

West-- John Paul II "ECCLESIA DE EUCHARISTIA" 2003
Entire Text: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/special_features/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_20030417_ecclesia_eucharistia_en.html

12. "This aspect of the universal charity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is based on the words of the Saviour himself. In instituting it, he did not merely say: “This is my body”, “this is my blood”, but went on to add: “which is given for you”, “which is poured out for you” (Lk 22:19-20). Jesus did not simply state that what he was giving them to eat and drink was his body and his blood; he also expressed its sacrificial meaning and made sacramentally present his sacrifice which would soon be offered on the Cross for the salvation of all. “The Mass is at the same time, and inseparably, the sacrificial memorial in which the sacrifice of the Cross is perpetuated and the sacred banquet of communion with the Lord’s body and blood”.

The Church constantly draws her life from the redeeming sacrifice; she approaches it not only through faith-filled remembrance, but also through a real contact, since this sacrifice is made present ever anew, sacramentally perpetuated, in every community which offers it at the hands of the consecrated minister. The Eucharist thus applies to men and women today the reconciliation won once for all by Christ for mankind in every age. “The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice”. Saint John Chrysostom put it well: “We always offer the same Lamb, not one today and another tomorrow, but always the same one. For this reason the sacrifice is always only one... Even now we offer that victim who was once offered and who will never be consumed”.

The Mass makes present the sacrifice of the Cross; it does not add to that sacrifice nor does it multiply it. What is repeated is its memorial celebration, its “commemorative representation” (memorialis demonstratio), which makes Christ's one, definitive redemptive sacrifice always present in time. The sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic mystery cannot therefore be understood as something separate, independent of the Cross or only indirectly referring to the sacrifice of Calvary."

Scalito

2005-10-31T08:53:00.000-05:00

If this nomination passes, the four most "conservative" Justices on the bench will be orthodox Catholics. Hopefully this will begin to make up for all the Kennedy's and Kerry's in the legislative branch.

Men in Mass

2005-10-28T20:01:00.000-04:00

This is a copy of comment I made on a message board regarding why women outnumber men in most Catholic parishes, and why this trend doesn't hold true in Latin Mass parishes.

For what its worth, some of the reasons that I as a man prefer the Tridentine Rite.

--The Mass is unapologetically first and foremost ordered as a Holy Sacrifice for the expiation of our sins. Sacrifice as worship is worthy of a man. In the Old Covenant I’d get to watch bulls and goats slaughtered and burned. In the New Covenant I get to participate in Christ the King offering Himself up to the Father as a pure and spotless sacrifice for my many sins, and in remembrance His bloody sacrifice 2000 years ago. It is not primarily a “feast” or “banquet” with all of us hanging out talking about how great the food is.

--A Mass is offered that organically developed over more than a millenium. It is not something that was slopped together over a couple of years by a few people with enough hubris to think that they could “do it better”. The predominantly sacrificial nature of the Mass is not obscured almost into oblivion. The whole Mass reflects this.

--You are surrounded by your family and other families. The sanctuary is not primarily filled with adults who have surgically or chemically castrated themselves. Real men like families, big families.

--The priests act like men and don’t use their homilies to ramble on week after week about “being nice”, whatever that means. You also don’t see them in the local supermarket wearing a cashmere sweater.

--The iconic nature of the Priest as an “alter Christus” is not obscured. The priest isn’t like an extra-extra-ordinary minister of Holy Communion. Nor is he a banquet planner or facilitator. I can identify with this Priest who I am certain is trembling before the Presence that is before Him, and is before me. We are in the presence of Almighty and All-Holy God, and as a man I can do nothing but kneel and bow my head and feel my smallness in sharing in so great a mystery.

--Many of the boys and young men in the parish think of serving at the altar as being one of the greatest honors of their childhood. Many of them would consider that being a priest is as manly as being a cop.

--There is a general awareness and sobriety about what is taking place. There are not college-aged girls wearing short shorts with the word “juicy” written across the butt that you happen to notice just prior to the consecration. Lust is not one of the seven deadly sins that I have to guard against during the Holy Mass.

--The “otherworldliness” is palpable. The incense and chant. The reverent responses of the congregants in Latin during the Low Mass. The vestments. The long silences that allow me to pray the Mass with the priest. The Mass has not become a continuation of the hustle and bustle that I just left outside of these doors. There is actual participation without active participation.

--The consistency. I know what I’m getting. The Novus Ordo is terribly inconsistent from parish to parish. Some Masses feel almost unrelated to others, there are major discrepancies on how the Mass is offered and abuses often abound.

That’s a few off the top of my head. Some slightly tongue in cheek. I believe that the current culture in most dioceses and parishes is antagonistic to and at best poorly expresses much of what I love within the Tridentine rite. Most of the above relate to emphasis on the Sacrificial nature of the Mass, and how that effects how the Mass is ordered.

Listen To The Pope

2005-10-19T19:42:00.000-04:00

Wow, a Catholic priest that stayed awake during his homiletics class and is putting to good use. I just listened to his homily from last week (October 16th), which was excellent. Please listen to it. Fr. Charles Pope, St. Thomas More Parish Washington D.C.

http://frpope.com/audio/recordings.php

Throwing a Bone to Scott

2005-10-15T12:18:00.000-04:00

Here is a short article for Scott T on Agrarianism. http://www.newpantagruel.com/issues/2.3/agrarianism.php
The New Pantagruel is a pretty neat magazine. Here is an interview with the co-founder Caleb Stegall from Godspy.
http://www.godspy.com/reviews/Reconnecting-with-Reality-Interview-with-Caleb-Stegall-by-David-Jones.cfm
He's from a Covenanter background.

A Time To Laugh

2005-10-05T18:07:00.000-04:00

Bought a new book today entitled "The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living". I'll share some portions from the introduction to the book written by Pope Alexander VI (one of the most notorious of the Borgia Popes). This is a book full of satire and wit and a love for Catholicism, a chatechesis of laughter if you will. Also included are quite a few recipes, some normal and others like "Feta Cheese Cigarettes" and "Smothered Squirrel". I plan to give it to a few "bad" Catholics I know. I highly recommend it to everyone, and it is modestly priced at 14.95.

"There aren't enough believing Catholics nowadays who are willing to laugh at themselves. Sometimes it seems that those who laugh don't believe, and those who believe don't laugh."

"One of the greatest problems in the Church over the centuries has been what we theologians call Pelagianism. It is the idea that God has established a set of perfectly reasonable rules, which are entirely within our power to obey-- and if we don't, it's just because we are weaklings. We don't belong in the Church-- which is a club for Saints. On this model, the Church is like a gourmet health spa for Olympic athletes-- or the gym run by Ben Stiller in the recent, wonderful movie Dodgeball. A place of rippling muscles, cardiovascular efficiency, and a great deal of sweating and grunting.
Any priest who has spent time hearing confessions knows better, of course. So should every self-reflective believer. In fact, the Church is less like a gymnasium than a trauma ward for gut-shot sinners. The gurneys and chairs are full of patients with varying levels of injury, while the doctors are spattered with blood. And Christ is less like an elite surgeon than the ultimate organ donor. So Catholic humor, while perfectly possible, ought to resemble the dark humor surgeons employ at the operating table-- for instance, when they make a kidney they've just removed into a little talking puppet ...
The authors seem to understand this. The "rules" laid out for man are completely impossible for him to obey in his fallen condition. Even with constant help from God, he does a pretty lousy job. The Sacraments help, of course-- in fact they're absolutely necessary-- but people screw up all the time nevertheless, even priests. (Imagine that.) We are most of us walking wounded, morally speaking. How do we deal with this fact? Pretend that it's normal, diluting the Gospel so that we can keep a good conscience? Or pretend it isn't true, and clench our fists until our knuckles turn white? Ideally, orthodoxy (correct belief) ought to lead to orthopraxy (correct behavior). To which I say, "if only." The authors of this book seem to have come to another solution, which I might call "ortholaxy." Believe it all, do what you can, admit that you're basically a bastard, and turn to the font of infinite Mercy as humbly and as often as you can. If there's one thing that's incompatible with Christianity, it's pride, or what we call today "healthy self-esteem" and a "clear conscience".

"P.S. If some of you charitable souls wouldn't mind saying a few extra intercessory prayers for the dead (see the Feast of All Souls, November 2nd, below), several of the popes in here would certainly appreciate it. Just asking ..."

Updated Links

2005-10-04T14:39:00.000-04:00

I have started to slowly update the links on my sidebar. Some may interest you.

Update on the Traditional Anglican Church

2005-09-28T17:26:00.000-04:00

An update of a post on the TAC I made awhile back.

"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 23, 2005
Contact: Office of the Bishop, 207-828-2012
Rt. Rev. George D. Langberg, Bishop

TRADITIONAL ANGLICAN CHURCH BISHOPS ENDORSE EFFORTS TO SEEK INTER-COMMUNION WITH ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Archbishop of the Traditional Anglican Communion and primate of the largest conservative Anglican Church in the World has received an endorsement from the U.S. and Central American Church bodies meeting in Portland Maine this week to begin developing a plan for inter-communion and unity with Rome. The Most Reverend John Hepworth, the highest-ranking cleric in the Traditional Anglican Church, attended the meeting of the General Synod of the Churches during the week of September 20-24. The Church bodies gave him an endorsement of his efforts to re-establish formal unity with the Holy See in Rome. He has led efforts on behalf of the Church to reestablish unity with the Roman Catholic Church with whom he has had discussions for the last several years. He has also made an effort to establish communion with European Lutherans seeking similar common ground with Rome. "We have no doctrinal differences with Rome" said the Archbishop in a recent interview. " The climate is brewing for the Traditional Anglican Communion to be the 27th ecclesial group accepted into communion with Rome and the first church touched by the Reformation to do so. "My broad vision is to see the end of the Reformation of the 16th century. Archbishop Hepworth said if Christians truly believe in the notion of an undivided Church, they ought to discover what it takes to find unity with both East and West and "be liberated from everything that stops it." The General Synod of the Anglican Church in America, including the Archbishop of Central America, endorsed the efforts of the Primate today in a strong vote of support. The Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion will now begin the preparation of a formal plan to present to the Vatican next year outlining how inter-communion and unity may be accomplished. The two churches have similar theological beliefs. The American Church was the last of the jurisdictions to endorse the efforts of the Primate due to timing of their National Synod. The Traditional Anglican Communion has members in 44 countries around the world.

2005-09-27T20:53:00.000-04:00

The North American Martyrs

2005-09-27T20:40:00.000-04:00

Here's an uplifting little tidbit from a transcript of a nice talk given by Fr. John A. Hardon S.J. on the North American Martyrs. He incidently was the spiritual director of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The National Shrine of the North American Martyrs is in Auriesville, N.Y. The Jesuits were primarily spreading the Gospel among the Hurons, who were bitter enemies with the fierce Iroquois Nation. The Jesuits were caught in the middle and suffered great loss and gained great glory for Christ. The full text of the following quoted material can be found at http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Martyrs/Martyrs_003.htm

"Isaac Jogues was first taken as a slave by the Mohawks in doing the most humiliating tasks among the Indians. He was tortured, in the process had his fingers chewed off. He managed to escape, went back to France and the question was--would he be able to say Mass. Pope Urban the 8th gave him permission. The Holy Father declared it would be unjust for a martyr of Christ not to drink the blood of Christ. So Isaac Jogues was, when he came back to the New World, was tomahawked to death. Anthony Daniel was offering Mass when the Iroquois attacked a Huron village. The Hurons were interested in the faith and Daniel was preaching among them and most of the people were interested in being received into the Church, but the Iroquois attacked. Daniel during the attack, ran around baptizing everybody in sight. Well, he baptized quite a few, but, he still saw a crowd that he had not reached so he took some wet rags and squeezed the water on these people while pronouncing the words of baptism. He himself did not try to escape. He was pierced with arrows and then all the people were huddled into a Church, the Church was set afire and the pierced body of Daniel, still breathing, was thrown into the Church where he had been offering Mass. From all accounts the worst tortures were reserved for Brebeuf and Lalemant. Among other excruciating pain which they had to suffer, they had their hands lopped off, had red hot hatchets applied to their bodies, then the Indians made belts of bark, soaked these belts in tar, bound their bodies with this resin dipped bark and set the bark and tar on fire. They were still not dead so pieces of their flesh were cut off with huge knives and miraculously they stayed alive so then the Indians to finish them off had cauldrons of boiling water poured on their bodies. It is no wonder given the circumstances of their martyrdom that the Indians were so impressed by the courage of these two men that after they died, the Indians drank their blood in order to acquire some of their courage."

2005-09-14T19:42:00.000-04:00

Incensing the Crucifix

The Growth of the Traditional Rite

2005-09-14T18:51:00.000-04:00

The Traditional Latin Rite has seen tremendous growth since the promulgation the letter ‘Quattuor Abhinc Annos’, which in 1984 authorized the celebration of the Rite of St Pius V, allowing the use of the Missal of 1962. There are restrictions on the celebration of the Mass according to the missal of '62, and currently to say this Mass the priest needs the permission of the Bishop of his Diocese. This is quite an odd fact, as Vatican II did not call for the deconstruction and destruction of the Latin Rite that occurred following the Council. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the chief liturgical text of the Council only stated the following:

“In Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be allotted to their mother tongue. This is to apply in the first place, to the readings and to the Common Prayer. But also as local conditions may warrant, to those parts which pertain to the people. Nevertheless steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them."

Far from abolishing Latin, the Council had a much more limited view on the use of the vernacular. The people are actually called upon to say or sing the Ordinary of the Mass (those parts of the Mass not changing from day to day) in Latin. Like so many other post-Vatican II innovations not called for by the Council itself, the Liturgy was radically adapted and transmuted and treated like a grand labratory for unlimited experimentation. Personally I think that this liturgical "renewal" caused the most harm to the Faith following the Council. Aside from many of the prayers being watered down in translation from the original Latin, many Priests simply added their own banality to the mix. The Liturgy being abused and turned into the Liturgy of Joe Bob Priest instead of the Liturgy of the Church, which all of the baptised have the right to have celebrated in their local parish.

The bright spots currently:
1) The contiued growth of the Traditional Rite. Many young families with many children
and many vocations to the priesthood. About 5-6 new weekly Traditional Rite Masses per
year in the U.S., primarily being offered by the Priestly Franternity of St. Peter and the
Institute of Christ the King. This number should increase as the number of seminarians is
growing every year.

2) A new translation of the Novus Ordo Missal (vernacular) which is much more faithful
to the original Latin. Should be implemented in the next two years.

3) Younger priests are much more orthodox and less apt to mess with the Liturgy.

2005-09-14T18:40:00.000-04:00

Taditional Rite 2005

More On Nominee Roberts

2005-09-12T13:49:00.000-04:00

I thought this was a very interesting article regarding Roberts. His priest, Msgr. Peter Vaghi, seems like a pretty influential character around Washington. I continue to feel comfortable with this nomination. See http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opeis104421085sep11,0,4244828.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

New Home Page

2005-09-10T22:33:00.000-04:00

This is our new parish home page. The church is currently being painted and Mass is being offered in the basement, so pictures of the sanctuary will probably be posted after completion of the paint job. Fr. Gismondi is such a holy pious priestly man of God, a true model for the devout life. Check out the link on the sidebar of St. Michael's Spinning Guild for pictures of a sheep being sheared in our church basement.

http://www.saintmichaelsrcc.org/

2005-09-07T21:19:00.000-04:00

As a woefully inadequate defender of the Catholic Faith I think I would do best to shut up. Too often I butt in with comments regarding the Catholic and Christian Faith I so dearly love and only tend to a disservice of Her. I'll try to listen more, ask a few questions, and comment less. I don't know why I'm posting this now. Perhaps I'm just blogged out, sick of polemics for pride's sake.

'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner'. The Eastern Orthodox Jesus Prayer. I can say that simple little line once with effort and thought, and know that He is for stumblers like us.

And my blessed Fra Pio's prayer after Holy Communion:

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You.
You know how easily I abandon You.
Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often.
Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life and without You I am without fervor.
Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light and without You I am in darkness.
Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.
Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice and follow You.
Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You very much and alway be in Your company.
Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.
Stay with me, Lord, as poor as my soul is I want it to be a place of consolation for You, a nest of Love.

Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late and the day is coming to a close and life passes, death, judgment and eternity approaches. It is necessary to renew my strenth, so that I will not stop along the way and for that, I need You. It is getting late and death approaches, I fear the darkness, the temptations, the dryness, the cross, the sorrows. O how I need You, my Jesus, in this night of exile!

Stay with me tonight, Jesus, in life with all its dangers, I need You.

Let me recognize You as Your disciples did at the breaking of the bread, so that the Eucharistic Communion be the Light which disperses the darkness, the force which sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.

Stay with me, Lord, because at the hour of my death, I want to remain united to You, if not by Communion, at least by grace and love.

Stay with me, Lord, for it is You alone I look for, Your Love, Your Grace, Your Will, Your Heart, Your Spirit, because I love You and ask no other reward but to love You more and more.
With a firm love, I will love You with all my heart while on earth and continue to love You perfectly during all eternity.

2005-08-17T20:07:00.000-04:00

I'm One

2005-08-02T20:53:00.000-04:00

Another view of the grotto

2005-08-02T20:48:00.000-04:00

Fr. Dobberstein in his grotto. Who needs a hard hat anyway?

2005-08-02T20:47:00.000-04:00

The Grotto

Eighth Wonder of the World?

2005-08-02T20:34:00.000-04:00

Maybe a bit much, but nonetheless pretty incredible. This is a link to the Grotto of the Redemption, built primarily by Fr. Paul Dobberstein over 42 years. The work still continues on after his death. It takes a special kind of person to build out their Faith like this. So if you're passing through Iowa ...
http://www.nw-cybermall.com/Grotto.htm

Supreme Battle

2005-07-21T10:40:00.000-04:00

John Roberts has been nominated for the Supreme Court. Call this number (I think it is right) to speak to your Senators asking for an up and down vote on Roberts-- (202) 224-3121
Roberts is Catholic, and is likely strongly Pro-Life from past statements. Hopefully he won't turn out to be a Justice Anthony Kennedy. Here is the religious affiliation of all the members of the High Court. I thought it was interesting.

Justice Affiliation

William H. Rehnquist Lutheran
Stephen G. Breyer Jewish
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jewish
Anthony M. Kennedy Catholic
Sandra Day O'Connor Episcopalian
Antonin Scalia Catholic
David H. Souter Episcopalian
John Paul Stevens Protestant
Clarence Thomas Catholic

For Leah

2005-07-01T21:47:00.000-04:00

Abby thought you might like to see a more recent shot of the little monster. I think that is a little sweet potatoes on the tip of his nose.

2005-07-01T21:44:00.000-04:00

The Owenzes visited earlier this week. Posted this mostly because Milly is so cute and Abby and John probably won't think they appear too flattering. We had a great time.

Newman, Newman, and Newman

2005-07-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

A few Newmans that I'm acquainted with.

1. Matt Newman, head brewmaster of C+C beer in the Candorish area of New York State.

2. Cardinal John Henry Newman-- John Owen just doubled my holdings of Newman's books in my library by donating "Favorite Newman Sermons" this week. Thank you kind sir.

3. Another former Anglican, Fr. Jay Scott Newman of Greenville, S.C. One of the "young ones" who gives me great hope. A sample of his homilies from 2004 and 2005 can be found here. http://www.stmarysgvl.org/discipleship-tape-archive.asp?year=2005

Here's to the name Newman, whose genetics seem to birth out some pretty decent Englishmen.

2005-06-17T10:42:00.000-04:00

A Big Rock

Choruses From The Rock-- T.S. Eliot-- 1934

2005-06-17T10:21:00.000-04:00

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

You neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore

I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?

There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem
And the holy places defiled;
Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.
And among his hearers were a few good men,
Many who were evil,
And most who were neither,
Like all men in all places.

In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.

Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless
Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

The work of creation is never without trevail

Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.

We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

Contraception and Chastity

2005-06-08T10:02:00.000-04:00

A well known article written by Elizabeth Anscombe in 1977, linked off an EO website. I thought it was a good article to print out and share if the opportunity arises.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/AnscombeChastity.shtml

In Contrast to Canterbury

2005-06-06T16:23:00.000-04:00

Well, Benedict XVI just made a few people really angry. Get ready for the homophobia charges.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050606/wl_nm/pope_gays_dc

2005-06-03T11:43:00.000-04:00

Hey what's with that dude in a dress? The man in the ahem, cassock, Father Guissani.

2005-06-03T11:36:00.000-04:00

CL'ers on Vacation in the mountains. A few beards, lots of little kids on laps, can't be that bad.

Communion and Liberation

2005-06-03T11:14:00.000-04:00

CL is a movement within the Church. It is hard to define or explain, but I have a superficial appreciation by reading a few books. I have been struck by the dizzying diverse expressions of the Catholic Faith by the devout, but CL was an exceptional breath of fresh air over against a Christian reductionism and dualism too prevelant among Christians inside and outside the Catholic Church.

I thought John would find it interesting to know (if he doesn't already, he has a nose for sniffing out the minutest of facts {librarian blood}) that the editor of the IMAGE Journal is involved with CL in some way or another, as is the godspy website I linked to earlier.

The "founder" of CL (though he set out to found nothing) was Father Luigi Guissani, who was an eminant theologian in the Diocese of Milan before leaving to teach high school Italian youth.
His story is very interesting, read about it here: http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=2699

One of the most interesting events held by CL is the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples. The following is off their website.

"With a yearly average of over 600 thousand visitors, the Meeting in Rimini—which has taken place every year since 1980, in a week during late August—is the most frequented summer festival of encounters, culture events, music and stage-shows in the world.Though the number and variety of events characterizing the program has increased over the years, the number of attendances is so great that the presence of the public at the single encounters, some of dealing with complex cultural questions, is extraordinary, often of the order of 5-10 thousand, sometimes reaching well over 10 thousand.Over the years we have presented events, exhibitions, theatrical productions and concerts of the highest level, in addition to witnesses by such historic personalities as John Paul II, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Eugene Ionesco, Lech Walesa, Giovanni Testori, William Congdon, Augusto del Noce, Olivier Clement, Mario Luzi, Margherita Guarducci, Giulio Andreotti and Riccardo Muti, who have enriched the kermesse with high-profile contributions.The Meeting aspires to be a place where the Christian faith “cries out to the whole world the passion for man which characterizes it,” always in open encounter, in dialogue and through acknowledging the value of human and artistic expressions coming from various cultures and traditions. "

C of E Caves

2005-05-31T11:35:00.000-04:00

The Church of England under the leadership of Archbishop Rowan Williams will allow gay and lesbian clergy to enter into "civil unions" and remain active in the C of E. Of couse, they must remain celibate (whew).

I can't imagine the turmoil and agony many orthodox Anglicans continue to live in. This is not the ECUSA acting out, this is the Archbishop of Canterbury submiting his "faith" to the civil law of England. This is very troubling for all Christians, for the leaders all communions that call themselves Christian will likely face the same stark choice in the next few years. God help us all to uphold the Faith.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632517,00.html

2005-05-31T09:51:00.000-04:00

This is me and my Dad in 10 years, showing my profession to be infinitely less glamorous than a prison librarian.

Hey Teacher, leave those kids alone! (Pink Floyd)

2005-05-30T18:24:00.000-04:00

I’ve pestered you Purdy’s enough, and think I have a basic grasp of your concept of authority. In this post I’ll share the first foundational premise of my framework of authority. Once we comment on this we can move on to a second, and more controversial premise.

The first premise of my framework of authority rests on the fact that I believe that Christ founded a visible Church, that the leaders of this primitive visible Church (the Apostles) were commissioned to preach the Word of God (primarily orally), and that those under the authority of the Apostles were bound to accept their teaching not as the word of men, but as the Word of God. The acceptance of the authority of these men and the acceptance of their teaching as the Word of God was a necessary condition to be able to exercise divine Faith that could result in Justification and Salvation.

Jesus Christ did not write down His Word (nor did He ask the Apostles to write down His Word) and ask His Apostles to start handing His written Word out to people to then let His Holy Spirit guide them individually to the truth or a portion of the truth. The primitive Church under the Apostles shows the reality of Christian faith being lived out as a community of believers, a Body, being “shepherded” by a collective Apostolic authority which is the cause of the unity of the Faith (as that collective Apostolic authority was being guided and protected by the Holy Spirit).

The following rather lengthy portion consists of quotes from a writing of Cardinal John Henry Newman entitled “Discourses to Mixed Congragations”. This is Discouse 10, on “Faith and Private Judgment”, which can be read in its entirety at the Newman Reader website. It is essentially what I stated above, but much more cogently expressed.
http://www.newmanreader.org

“… Now, in the first place, what is faith? it is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God. In the ordinary course of this world we account things true either because we see them, or because we can perceive that they follow and are deducible from what we do see; that is, we gain truth by sight or by reason, not by faith. You will say indeed, that we accept a number of things which we cannot prove or see, on the word of others; certainly, but then we accept what they say only as the word of man; and we have not commonly that absolute and unreserved confidence in them, which nothing can shake. We know that man is open to mistake, and we are always glad to find some confirmation of what he says, from other quarters, in any important matter; or we receive his information with negligence and unconcern, as something of little consequence, as a matter of opinion; or, if we act upon it, it is as a matter of prudence, thinking it best and safest to do so. We take his word for what it is worth, and we use it either according to our necessity, or its probability. We keep the decision in our own hands, and reserve to ourselves the right of reopening the question whenever we please. This is very different from Divine faith; he who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities;—it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it receives the tidings from one who comes from God.

This is what faith was in the time of the Apostles, as no one can deny; and what it was then, it must be now, else it ceases to be the same thing. I say, it certainly was this in the Apostles' time, for you know they preached to the world that Christ was the Son of God, that He was born of a Virgin, that He had ascended on high, that He would come again to judge all, the living and the dead. Could the world see all this? could it prove it? how then were men to receive it? why did so many embrace it? on the word of the Apostles, who were, as their powers showed, messengers from God. Men were told to submit their reason to a living authority. Moreover, whatever an Apostle said, his converts were bound to believe; when they entered the Church, they entered it in order to learn. The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them. No one doubts, no one can doubt this, of those primitive times. A Christian was bound to take without doubting all that the Apostles declared to be revealed; if the Apostles spoke, he had to yield an internal assent of his mind; it would not be enough to keep silence, it would not be enough not to oppose: it was not allowable to credit in a measure; it was not allowable to doubt. No; if a convert had his own private thoughts of what was said, and only kept them to himself, if he made some secret opposition to the teaching, if he waited for further proof before he believed it, this would be a proof that he did not think the Apostles were sent from God to reveal His will; it would be a proof that he did not in any true sense believe at all. Immediate, implicit submission of the mind was, in the lifetime of the Apostles, the only, the necessary token of faith; then there was no room whatever for what is now called private judgment. No one could say: "I will choose my religion for myself, I will believe this, I will not believe that; I will pledge myself to nothing; I will believe just as long as I please, and no longer; what I believe today I will reject tomorrow, if I choose. I will believe what the Apostles have as yet said, but I will not believe what they shall say in time to come." No; either the Apostles were from God, or they were not; if they were, everything that they preached was to be believed by their hearers; if they were not, there was nothing for their hearers to believe. To believe a little, to believe more or less, was impossible; it contradicted the very notion of believing: if one part was to be believed, every part was to be believed; it was an absurdity to believe one thing and not another; for the word of the Apostles, which made the one true, made the other true too; they were nothing in themselves, they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God. The world had either to become Christian, or to let it alone; there was no room for private tastes and fancies, no room for private judgment.

Now surely this is quite clear from the nature of the case; but is also clear from the words of Scripture. "We give thanks to God," says St. Paul, "without ceasing, because when ye had received from us the word of hearing, which is of God, ye received it, not as the word of men, but (as it is indeed) the Word of God." Here you see St. Paul expresses what I have said above; that the Word comes from God, that it is spoken by men, that it must be received, not as man's word, but as God's word. So in another place he says: "He who despiseth these things, despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given in us His Holy Spirit". Our Saviour had made a like declaration already: "He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me; and he that despiseth Me, despiseth Him that sent Me". Accordingly, St. Peter on the day of Pentecost said: "Men of Israel, hear these words, God hath raised up this Jesus, whereof we are witnesses. Let all the house of Israel know most certainly that God hath made this Jesus, whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ." At another time he said: "We ought to obey God, rather than man; we are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Ghost, whom God has given to all who obey Him". And again: "He commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that it is He (Jesus) who hath been appointed by God to be the Judge of the living and of the dead". And you know that the persistent declaration of the first preachers was: "Believe and thou shalt be saved": they do not say, "prove our doctrine by your own reason," nor "wait till you see before you believe"; but, "believe without seeing and without proving, because our word is not our own, but God's word". Men might indeed use their reason in inquiring into the pretensions of the Apostles; they might inquire whether or not they did miracles; they might inquire whether they were predicted in the Old Testament as coming from God; but when they had ascertained this fairly in whatever way, they were to take all the Apostles said for granted without proof; they were to exercise their faith, they were to be saved by hearing. Hence, as you perhaps observed, St. Paul significantly calls the revealed doctrine "the word of hearing," in the passage I quoted; men came to hear, to accept, to obey, not to criticise what was said; and in accordance with this he asks elsewhere: "How shall they believe Him, whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
Now, my dear brethren, consider, are not these two states or acts of mind quite distinct from each other;—to believe simply what a living authority tells you, and to take a book, such as Scripture, and to use it as you please, to master it, that is, to make yourself the master of it, to interpret it for yourself, and to admit just what you choose to see in it, and nothing more? Are not these two procedures distinct in this, that in the former you submit, in the latter you judge? At this moment I am not asking you which is the better, I am not asking whether this or that is practicable now, but are they not two ways of taking up a doctrine, and not one? is not submission quite contrary to judging? Now, is it not certain that faith in the time of the Apostles consisted in submitting? and is it not certain that it did not consist in judging for one's self. It is in vain to say that the man who judges from the Apostles' writings, does submit to those writings in the first instance, and therefore has faith in them; else why should he refer to them at all? There is, I repeat, an essential difference between the act of submitting to a living oracle, and to his written words; in the former case there is no appeal from the speaker, in the latter the final decision remains with the reader. Consider how different is the confidence with which you report another's words in his presence and in his absence. If he be absent, you boldly say that he holds so and so, or said so and so; but let him come into the room in the midst of the conversation, and your tone is immediately changed. It is then, "I think I have heard you say something like this, or what I took to be this"; or you modify considerably the statement or the fact to which you originally pledged him, dropping one-half of it for safety sake, or retrenching the most startling portions of it; and then after all you wait with some anxiety to see whether he will accept any portion of it at all. The same sort of process takes place in the case of the written document of a person now dead. I can fancy a man magisterially expounding St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians or to the Ephesians, who would be better content with the writer's absence than his sudden reappearance among us; lest the Apostle should take his own meaning out of his commentator's hands and explain it for himself. In a word, though he says he has faith in St. Paul's writings, he confessedly has no faith in St. Paul; and though he may speak much about truth as found in Scripture, he has no wish at all to be like one of these Christians whose names and deeds occur in it.
Such is the only rational, consistent account of faith; but so far are Protestants from professing it, that they laugh at the very notion of it. They laugh at the notion itself of men pinning their faith (as they express themselves) upon Pope or Council; they think it simply superstitious and narrow-minded, to profess to believe just what the Church believes, and to assent to whatever she will say in time to come on matters of doctrine. That is, they laugh at the bare notion of doing what Christians undeniably did in the time of the Apostles. Observe, they do not merely ask whether the Catholic Church has a claim to teach, has authority, has the gifts;—this is a reasonable question;—no, they think that the very state of mind which such a claim involves in those who admit it, namely, the disposition to accept without reserve or question, that this is slavish. They call it priestcraft to insist on this surrender of the reason, and superstition to make it. That is, they quarrel with the very state of mind which all Christians had in the age of the Apostles; nor is there any doubt (who will deny it?) that those who thus boast of not being led blindfold, of judging for themselves, of believing just as much and just as little as they please, of hating dictation, and so forth, would have found it an extreme difficulty to hang on the lips of the Apostles, had they lived at their date, or rather would have simply resisted the sacrifice of their own liberty of thought, would have thought life eternal too dearly purchased at such a price, and would have died in their unbelief. And they would have defended themselves on the plea that it was absurd and childish to ask them to believe without proof, to bid them give up their education, and their intelligence, and their science, and in spite of all those difficulties which reason and sense find in the Christian doctrine, in spite of its mysteriousness, its obscurity, its strangeness, its unacceptableness, its severity, to require them to surrender themselves to the teaching of a few unlettered Galilæans, or a learned indeed but fanatical Pharisee. This is what they would have said then; and if so, is it wonderful they do not become Catholics now? The simple account of their remaining as they are, is, that they lack one thing,—they have not faith; it is a state of mind, it is a virtue, which they do not recognise to be praiseworthy, which they do not aim at possessing.

What they feel now, my brethren, is just what both Jew and Greek felt before them in the time of the Apostles, and what the natural man has felt ever since. The great and wise men of the day looked down upon faith, then as now, as if it were unworthy the dignity of human nature: "See your vocation, brethren, that there are not," among you, "many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen to confound the strong, and the mean things of the world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and things that are not, that He might destroy the things that are, that no flesh might glory in His sight". Hence the same Apostle speaks of "the foolishness of preaching". Similar to this is what our Lord had said in His prayer to the Father: "I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto little ones". Now, is it not plain that men of this day have just inherited the feelings and traditions of these falsely wise and fatally prudent persons in our Lord's day? They have the same obstruction in their hearts to entering the Catholic Church, which Pharisees and Sophists had before them; it goes against them to believe her doctrine, not so much for want of evidence that she is from God, as because, if so, they shall have to submit their minds to living men, who have not their own cultivation or depth of intellect, and because they must receive a number of doctrines, whether they will or no, which are strange to their imagination and difficult to their reason. The very characteristic of the Catholic teaching and of the Catholic teacher is to them a preliminary objection to their becoming Catholics, so great, as to throw into the shade any argument however strong, which is producible in behalf of the mission of those teachers and the origin of that teaching. In short, they have not faith.

They have not in them the principle of faith; and I repeat, it is nothing to the purpose to urge that at least they firmly believe Scripture to be the Word of God. In truth, it is much to be feared that their acceptance of Scripture itself is nothing better than a prejudice or inveterate feeling impressed on them when they were children. A proof of it is this; that, while they profess to be so shocked at Catholic miracles, and are not slow to call them "lying wonders," they have no difficulty at all about Scripture narratives, which are quite as difficult to the reason as any miracles recorded in the history of the Saints. I have heard on the contrary of Catholics who have been startled at first reading in Scripture the narratives of the ark in the deluge, of the tower of Babel, of Balaam and Balac, of the Israelites' flight from Egypt and entrance into the promised land, and of Esau's and Saul's rejection; which the bulk of Protestants receive without any effort of mind. How, then, do these Catholics accept them? by faith. They say, "God is true, and every man a liar". How come Protestants so easily to receive them? by faith? Nay, I conceive that in most cases there is no submission of the reason at all; simply they are so familiar with the passages in question, that the narrative presents no difficulties to their imagination; they have nothing to overcome. If, however, they are led to contemplate these passages in themselves, and to try them in the balance of probability, and to begin to question about them, as will happen when their intellect is cultivated, then there is nothing to bring them back to their former habitual or mechanical belief; they know nothing of submitting to authority, that is, they know nothing of faith; for they have no authority to submit to. They either remain in a state of doubt without any great trouble of mind, or they go on to ripen into utter disbelief on the subjects in question, though they may say nothing about it. Neither before they doubt, nor when they doubt, is there any token of the presence in them of a power subjecting reason to the Word of God. No; what looks like faith, is a mere hereditary persuasion, not a personal principle; it is a habit which they have learned in the nursery, which has never changed into anything higher, and which is scattered and disappears, like a mist, before the light, such as it is, of reason. If, however, there are Protestants, who are not in one or other of these two states, either of credulity or of doubt, but who firmly believe in spite of all difficulties, they certainly have some claim to be considered under the influence of faith; but there is nothing to show that such persons, where they are found, are not in the way to become Catholics, and perhaps they are already called so by their friends, showing in their own examples the logical, indisputable connexion which exists between possessing faith and joining the Church.
If, then, faith be now the same faculty of mind, the same sort of habit or act, which it was in the days of the Apostles, I have made good what I set about showing. But it must be the same; it cannot mean two things; the Word cannot have changed its meaning. Either say that faith is not necessary now at all, or take it to be what the Apostles meant by it, but do not say that you have it, and then show me something quite different, which you have put in the place of it. In the Apostles' days the peculiarity of faith was submission to a living authority; this is what made it so distinctive; this is what made it an act of submission at all; this is what destroyed private judgment in matters of religion. If you will not look out for a living authority, and will bargain for private judgment, then say at once that you have not Apostolic faith. And in fact you have it not; the bulk of this nation has it not; confess you have it not; and then confess that this is the reason why you are not Catholics. You are not Catholics because you have not faith.

Oh, deplorable state! deplorable because it is utterly and absolutely their own fault, and because such great stress is laid in Scripture, as they know, on the necessity of faith for salvation. Faith is there made the foundation and commencement of all acceptable obedience. It is described as the "argument" or "proof of things not seen"; by faith men have understood that God is, that He made the world, that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him, that the flood was coming, that their Saviour was to be born. "Without faith it is impossible to please God"; "by faith we stand"; "by faith we walk"; "by faith we overcome the world". When our Lord gave to the Apostles their commission to preach all over the world, He continued, "He that believeth and is baptised, shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be condemned". And He declared to Nicodemus, "He that believeth in the Son, is not judged; but he that doth not believe is already judged, because he believeth not in the Name of the Only-begotten Son of God". He said to the Pharisees, "If you believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins". To the Jews, "Ye believe not, because ye are not of My sheep". And you may recollect that before His miracles, He commonly demands faith of the supplicant: "All things are possible," He says, "to him that believeth"; and we find in one place, "He could not do any miracle," on account of the unbelief of the inhabitants.

Has faith changed its meaning, or is it less necessary now? Is it not still what it was in the Apostles' day, the very characteristic of Christianity, the special instrument of renovation, the first disposition for justification, one out of the three theological virtues? God might have renewed us by other means, by sight, by reason, by love, but He has chosen to "purify our hearts by faith"; it has been His will to select an instrument which the world despises, but which is of immense power. He preferred it, in His infinite wisdom, to every other; and if men have it not, they have not the very element and rudiment, out of which are formed, on which are built, the Saints and Servants of God. And they have it not; they are living, they are dying, without the hopes, without the aids of the Gospel, because, in spite of so much that is good in them, in spite of their sense of duty, their tenderness of conscience on many points, their benevolence, their uprightness, their generosity, they are under the dominion (I must say it) of a proud fiend; they have this stout spirit within them, they determine to be their own masters in matters of thought, about which they know so little; they consider their own reason better than any one's else; they will not admit that any one comes from God who contradicts their own view of truth. What! is none their equal in wisdom anywhere? is there none other whose word is to be taken on religion? is there none to wrest from them their ultimate appeal to themselves? Have they in no possible way the occasion or opportunity of faith? Is it a virtue, which, in consequence of their transcendent sagacity, their prerogative of omniscience, they must give up hope of exercising? If the pretensions of the Catholic Church do not satisfy them, let them go somewhere else, if they can. If they are so fastidious that they cannot trust her as the oracle of God, let them find another more certainly from Him than the House of His own institution, which has ever been called by His name, has ever maintained the same claims, has ever taught one substance of doctrine, and has triumphed over those who preached any other. Since Apostolic faith was in the beginning reliance on man's word, as being God's word, since what faith was then such it is now, since faith is necessary for salvation, let them attempt to exercise it towards another, if they will not accept the Bride of the Lamb. Let them, if they can, put faith in some of those religions which have lasted a whole two or three centuries in a corner of the earth. Let them stake their eternal prospects on kings and nobles and parliaments and soldiery, let them take some mere fiction of the law, or abortion of the schools, or idol of a populace, or upstart of a crisis, or oracle of lecture-rooms, as the prophet of God. Alas! they are hardly bestead if they must possess a virtue, which they have no means of exercising,—if they must make an act of faith, they know not on whom, and know not why!”

Any comments/questions to this rather general first premise?

Father Al Swimming to Rome

2005-05-19T10:38:00.000-04:00

Fr. Al Kimel, former Episcopal priest, announced today that he will enter into communion with the Catholic Church in the near future. I know John knows of his blog (http://pontifications.classicalanglican.net/), which I felt was one of the most thought provoking Christian blogs around. Fight the good fight Father.

Irish Wisdom

2005-05-15T19:21:00.000-04:00

Lifted from www.godspy.com Check it out.

Flannery O'Connor, in answer to a critic who said devout Catholics were "brainwashed," and lacking in the freedom necessary to be first-rate creative writers, said "there is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery." She challenged non-believers to consider the unseen reality, the eternal truths, within and beyond the visible world.

O'Connor was equally direct when addressing fellow Catholics and other believers. She criticized those who try to "tidy up reality," letting spiritual pride blind them to the realities of our fallen, broken existence. "We lost our innocence in the Fall," she said, "and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite."

Controversy

2005-05-04T21:54:00.000-04:00

As the title suggests, there is but one purpose for this post. I will be severely disappointed if I receive no comments.

Excerpt from Tertullian circa A.D. 200 from his Catholic heyday, prior to his schism with the Montanists.
I don't think his later schism to a great degree should affect his arguments below, because the claim to apostolic authority was the claim of so many of the early fathers against heretics and their perversion of the Holy Scriptures. This appeal was normative in the early Church.

"The Prescription Against Heretics"- from ccel.org (Calvin College site)

Chapter XIX. Appeal, in Discussion of Heresy, Lies Not to the Scriptures. The Scriptures Belong Only to Those Who Have the Rule of Faith.

Our appeal, therefore, must not be made to the Scriptures; nor must controversy be admitted on points in which victory will either be impossible, or uncertain, or not certain enough. But even if a discussion from the Scriptures should not turn out in such a way as to place both sides on a par, (yet) the natural order of things would require that this point should be first proposed, which is now the only one which we must discuss: "With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong. From what and through whom, and when, and to whom, has been handed down that rule, by which men become Christians? "For wherever it shall be manifest that the true Christian rule and faith shall be, there will likewise be the true Scriptures and expositions thereof, and all the Christian traditions.

Chapter XX.-Christ First Delivered the Faith. The Apostles Spread It; They Founded Churches as the Depositories Thereof. That Faith, Therefore, is Apostolic, Which Descended from the Apostles, Through Apostolic Churches.

Christ Jesus our Lord (may He bear with me a moment in thus expressing myself!), whosoever He is, of what God soever He is the Son, of what substance soever He is man and God, of what faith soever He is the, teacher, of what reward soever He is the Promiser, did, whilst He lived on earth, Himself declare what He was, what He had been, what the Father's will was which He was administering, what the duty of man was which He was prescribing; (and this declaration He made, ) either openly to the people, or privately to His disciples, of whom He had chosen the twelve chief ones to be at His side, and whom He destined to be the teachers of the nations. Accordingly, after one of these had been struck off, He commanded the eleven others, on His departure to the Father, to "go and teach all nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost." Immediately, therefore, so did the apostles, whom this designation indicates as "the sent." Having, on the authority of a prophecy, which occurs in a psalm of David, chosen Matthias by lot as the twelfth, into the place of Judas, they obtained the promised power of the Holy Ghost for the gift of miracles and of utterance; and after first bearing witness to the faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judµa, and rounding churches (there), they next went forth into the world and preached the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations. They then in like manner rounded churches in every city, from which all the other churches, one after another, derived the tradition of the faith, and the seeds of doctrine, and are every day deriving them, that they may become churches. Indeed, it is on this account only that they will be able to deem themselves apostolic, as being the offspring of apostolic churches. Every sort of thing must necessarily revert to its original for its classification. Therefore the churches, although they are so many and so great, comprise but the one primitive church, (rounded) by the apostles, from which they all (spring). In this way all are primitive, and all are apostolic, whilst they are all proved to be one, in (unbroken) unity, by their peaceful communion, and title of brotherhood, and bond of hospitality,-privileges which no other rule directs than the one tradition of the selfsame mystery.

Chapter XXI.-All Doctrine True Which Comes Through the Church from the Apostles, Who Were Taught by God Through Christ. All Opinion Which Has No Such Divine Origin and Apostolic Tradition to Show, is Ipso Facto False.

From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed; for "no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." Nor does the Son seem to have revealed Him to any other than the apostles, whom He sent forth to preach-that, of course, which He revealed to them. Now, what that was which they preached-in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them-can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles rounded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves, both vivG voce, as the phrase is, and subsequently by their epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is in the same degree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches-those moulds and original sources of the faith must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the (said) churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God. Whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savours of contrariety to the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God. It remains, then, that we demonstrate whether this doctrine of ours, of which we have now given the rule, has its origin in the tradition of the apostles, and whether all other doctrines do not ipso facto proceed from falsehood. We hold communion with the apostolic churches because our doctrine is in no respect different from theirs. This is our witness of truth.

Chapter XXII.-Attempt to Invalidate This Rule of Faith Rebutted. The Apostles Safe Transmitters of the Truth. Sufficiently Taught at First, and Faithful in the Transmission.

But inasmuch as the proof is so near at hand, that if it were at once produced there would be nothing left to be dealt with, let us give way for a while to the opposite side, if they think that they can find some means of invalidating this rule, just as if no proof were forthcoming from us. They usually tell us that the apostles did not know all things: (but herein) they are impelled by the same madness, whereby they turn round to the very opposite point, and declare that the apostles certainly knew all things, but did not deliver all things to all persons,-in either case exposing Christ to blame for having sent forth apostles who had either too much ignorance, or too little simplicity. What man, then, of sound mind can possibly suppose that they were ignorant of anything, whom the Lord ordained to be masters (or teachers), keeping them, as He did, inseparable (from Himself) in their attendance, in their discipleship, in their society, to whom, "when they were alone, He used to expound" all things which were obscure, telling them that "to them it was given to know those mysteries," which it was not permitted the people to understand? Was anything withheld from the knowledge of Peter, who is called "the rock on which the church should be built," who also obtained "the keys of the kingdom of heaven," with the power of "loosing and binding in heaven and on earth? " Was anything, again, concealed from John, the Lord's most beloved disciple, who used to lean on His breast to whom alone the Lord pointed Judas out as the traitor, whom He commended to Mary as a son in His own stead? Of what could He have meant those to be ignorant, to whom He even exhibited His own glory with Moses and Elias, and the Father's voice moreover, from heaven? Not as if He thus disapproved of all the rest, but because "by three witnesses must every word be established." After the same fashion, too, (I suppose, ) were they ignorant to whom, after His resurrection also, He vouchsafed, as they were journeying together, "to expound all the Scriptures." No doubt He had once said, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot hear them now; "but even then He added, "When He, the Spirit of truth, shall come, He will lead you into all truth." He (thus) shows that there was nothing of which they were ignorant, to whom He had promised the future attainment of all truth by help of the Spirit of truth. And assuredly He fulfilled His promise, since it is proved in the Acts of the Apostles that the Holy Ghost did come down. Now they who reject that Scripture can neither belong to the Holy Spirit, seeing that they cannot acknowledge that the Holy Ghost has been sent as yet to the disciples, nor can they presume to claim to be a church themselves who positively have no means of proving when, and with what swaddling-clothes this body was established. Of so much importance is it to them not to have any proofs for the things which they maintain, lest along with them there be introduced damaging exposures of those things which they mendaciously devise.

Chapter XXIII.-The Apostles Not Ignorant. The Heretical Pretence of St. Peter's Imperfection Because He Was Rebuked by St. Paul. St. Peter Not Rebuked for Error in Teaching.

Now, with the view of branding the apostles with some mark of ignorance, they put forth the case of Peter and them that were with him having been rebuked by Paul. "Something therefore," they say, "was wanting in them." (This they allege, ) in order that they may from this construct that other position of theirs, that a fuller knowledge may possibly have afterwards come over (the apostles, ) such as fell to the share of Paul when he rebuked those who preceded him. I may here say to those who reject The Acts of the Apostles: "It is first necessary that you shows us who this Paul was,-both what he was before he was an apostle, and how he became an apostle,"-so very great is the use which they make of him in respect of other questions also. It is true that he tells us himself that he was a persecutor before he became an apostle, still this is not enough for any man who examines before he believes, since even the Lord Himself did not bear witness of Himself. But let them believe without the Scriptures, if their object is to believe contrary to the Scriptures. Still they should show, from the circumstance which they allege of Peter's being rebuked by Paul, that Paul added yet another form of the gospel besides that which Peter and the rest had previously set forth. But the fact is, having been converted from a persecutor to a preacher, he is introduced as one of the brethren to brethren, by brethren-to them, indeed, by men who had put on faith from the apostles' hands. Afterwards, as he himself narrates, he "went up to Jerusalem for the purpose of seeing Peter," because of his office, no doubt, and by right of a common belief and preaching. Now they certainly would not have been surprised at his having become a preacher instead of a persecutor, if his preaching were of something contrary; nor, moreover, would they have "glorified the Lord," because Paul had presented himself as an adversary to Him They accordingly even gave him "the right hand of fellowship," as a sign of their agreement with him, and arranged amongst themselves a distribution of office, not a diversity of gospel, so that they should severally preach not a different gospel, but (the same), to different persons, Peter to the circumcision, Paul to the Gentiles. Forasmuch, then, as Peter was rebuked because, after he had lived with the Gentiles, he proceeded to separate himself from their company out of respect for persons, the fault surely was one of conversation, not of preaching. For it does not appear from this, that any other God than the Creator, or any other Christ than (the son) of Mary, or any other hope than the resurrection, was (by him) announced.

Chapter XXXV.-Let Heretics Maintain Their Claims by a Definite and Intelligible Evidence. This the Only Method of Solving Their Questions. Catholics Appeal Always to Evidence Traceable to Apostolic Sources.

Challenged and refuted by us, according to these definitions, let all the heresies boldly on their part also advance similar rules to these against our doctrine, whether they be later than the apostles or contemporary with the apostles, provided they be different from them; provided also they were, by either a general or a specific censure, precondemned by them. For since they deny the truth of (our doctrine), they ought to prove that it also is heresy, refutable by the same rule as that by which they are themselves refuted; and at the same time to show us where we must seek the truth, which it is by this time evident has no existence amongst them. Our system is not behind any in date; on the contrary, it is earlier than all; and this fact will be the evidence of that truth which everywhere occupies the first place. The apostles, again, nowhere condemn it; they rather defend it,-a fact which will show that it comes from themselves. For that doctrine which they refrain from condemning, when they have condemned every strange opinion, they show to be their own, and on that ground too they defend it.

Chapter XXXVI.-The Apostolic Churches the Voice of the Apostles. Let the Heretics Examine Their Apostolic Claims, in Each Case, Indisputable. The Church of Rome Doubly Apostolic; Its Early Eminence and Excellence. Heresy, as Perverting the Truth, is Connected Therewith.

Come now, you who would indulge a better curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation, run over the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally. Achaia is very near you, (in which) you find Corinth. Since you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi; (and there too) you have the Thessalonians. Since you are able to cross to Asia, you get Ephesus. Since, moreover, you are close upon Italy, you have Rome, from which there comes even into our own hands the very authority (of apostles themselves). How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! where Peter endures a passion like his Lord's! where Paul wins his crown in a death like John's where the Apostle John was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile! See what she has learned, what taught, what fellowship has had with even (our) churches in Africa! One Lord God does she acknowledge, the Creator of the universe, and Christ Jesus (born) of the Virgin Mary, the Son of God the Creator; and the Resurrection of the flesh; the law and the prophets she unites in one volume with the writings of evangelists and apostles, from which she drinks in her faith. This she seals with the water (of baptism), arrays with the Holy Ghost, feeds with the Eucharist, cheers with martyrdom, and against such a discipline thus (maintained) she admits no gainsayer. This is the discipline which I no longer say foretold that heresies should come, but from which they proceeded. However, they were not of her, because they were opposed to her. Even the rough wild-olive arises from the germ of the fruitful, rich, and genuine olive; also from the seed of the mellowest and sweetest fig there springs the empty and useless wild-fig. In the same way heresies, too, come from our plant, although not of our kind; (they come) from the grain of truth, but, owing to their falsehood, they have only wild leaves to show.

Chapter XXXVII.-Heretics Not Being Christians, But Rather Perverters of Christ's Teaching, May Not Claim the Christian Scriptures. These are a Deposit, Committed to and Carefully Kept by the Church.

Since this is the case, in order that the truth may be adjudged to belong to us, "as many as walk according to the rule," which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reason of our position is clear, when it determines that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without the Scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because it is not from Christ that they get that which they pursue of their own mere choice, and from the pursuit incur and admit the name of heretics. Thus, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, "Who are you? When and whence did you come? As you are none of mine, what have you to do with that which is mine? Indeed, Marcion, by what right do you hew my wood? By whose permission, Valentinus, are you diverting the streams of my fountain? By what power, Apelles, are you removing my landmarks? This is my property. Why are you, the rest, sowing and feeding here at your own pleasure? This (I say) is my property. I have long possessed it; I possessed it before you. I hold sure title-deeds from the original owners themselves, to whom the estate belonged. I am the heir of the apostles. Just as they carefully prepared their will and testament, and committed it to a trust, and adjured (the trustees to be faithful to their charge), even so do I hold it. As for you, they have, it is certain, always held you as disinherited, and rejected you as strangers-as enemies. But on what ground are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, if it be not from the difference of their teaching, which each individual of his own mere will has either advanced or received in opposition to the apostles? "

Chapter XXXVIII.-Harmony of the Church and the Scriptures. Heretics Have Tampered with the Scriptures, and Mutilated, and Altered Them. Catholics Never Change the Scriptures, Which Always Testify for Them.

Where diversity of doctrine is found, there, then, must the corruption both of the Scriptures and the expositions thereof be regarded as existing. On those whose purpose it was to teach differently, lay the necessity of differently arranging the instruments of doctrine. They could not possibly have effected their diversity of teaching in any other way than by having a difference in the means whereby they taught. As in their case, corruption in doctrine could not possibly have succeeded without a corruption also of its instruments, so to ourselves also integrity of doctrine could not have accrued, without integrity in those means by which doctrine is managed. Now, what is there in our Scriptures which is contrary to us? What of our own have we introduced, that we should have to take it away again, or else add to it, or alter it, in order to restore to its natural soundness anything which is contrary to it, and contained in the Scriptures? What we are ourselves, that also the Scriptures are (and have been) from the beginning. Of them we have our being, before there was any other way, before they were interpolated by you. Now, inasmuch as all interpolation must be believed to be a later process, for the express reason that it proceeds from rivalry which is never in any case previous to nor home-born with that which it emulates, it is as incredible to every man of sense that we should seem to have introduced any corrupt text into the Scriptures, existing, as we have been, from the very first, and being the first, as it is that they have not in fact introduced it who are both later in date and opposed (to the Scriptures). One man perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their meaning by his exposition. For although Valentinus seems to use the entire volume, he has none the less laid violent hands on the truth only with a more cunning mind and skill than Marcion. Marcion expressly and openly used the knife, not the pen, since he made such an excision of the Scriptures as suited his own subject-matter. Valentinus, however, abstained from such excision, because he did not invent Scriptures to square with his own subject-matter, but adapted his matter to the Scriptures; and yet he took away more, and added more, by removing the proper meaning of every particular word, and adding fantastic arrangements of things which have no real existence.

Chapter XXXIX.-What St. Paul Calls Spiritual Wickednesses Displayed by Pagan Authors, and by Heretics, in No Dissimilar Manner. Holy Scripture Especially Liable to Heretical Manipulation. Affords Material for Heresies, Just as Virgil Has Been the Groundwork of Literary Plagiarisms, Different in Purport from the Original.

These were the ingenious arts of "spiritual wickednesses," wherewith we also, my brethren, may fairly expect to have "to wrestle," as necessary for faith, that the elect may be made manifest, (and) that the reprobate may be discovered. And therefore they possess influence, and a facility in thinking out and fabricating errors, which ought not to be wondered at as if it were a difficult and inexplicable process, seeing that in profane writings also an example comes ready to hand of a similar facility. You see in our own day, composed out of Virgil, a story of a wholly different character, the subject-matter being arranged according to the verse, and the verse according to the subject-matter. In short, Hosidius Geta has most completely pilfered his tragedy of Medea from Virgil. A near relative of my own, among some leisure productions of his pen, has composed out of the same poet The Table of Cebes. On the same principle, those poetasters are commonly called Homerocentones, "collectors of Homeric odds and ends," who stitch into one piece, patchwork fashion, works of their own from the lines of Homer, out of many scraps put together from this passage and from that (in miscellaneous confusion). Now, unquestionably, the Divine Scriptures are more fruitful in resources of all kinds for this sort of facility. Nor do I risk contradiction in saying that the very Scriptures were even arranged by the will of God in such a manner as to furnish materials for heretics, inasmuch as I read that "there must be heresies, which there cannot be without the Scriptures.

2005-04-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

Wish You Were Here- Scranton 1919

Get Your Tickets!

2005-04-27T20:23:00.000-04:00

I hear there is soon going to be a Synod of sorts in Scranton which will bring Abby (my sister) and John (her husband) and two little girls to our neck of the woods. I couldn't find any information on the internet, so I'm wondering if this is going to be a subversive Synod. I have a sneaking suspicion that you could score a couple of tickets here ( http://www.federationorc.org/).

I am wondering what role John will play in all this. Perhaps he will be sent to the the Bishop of Scranton
(http://www.dioceseofscranton.org/mainpage/index.htm) with a case of Crown and Covenant beer as an ecumenical gesture. Perhaps he will be sent to nail 95 theses regarding Paedocommunion to the nearest Reformed Church lacking in this discipline. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps ... ... ...

In any event, we want to take them to an Irish Pub (that's the best place for the children), and have them hang out at our house (we charge less than a hostel).

I thought the mention of "beer" and "Pub" in one short post would put my Dad in a giddy mood if he happens to read this. Cheers Dad!

Thought

2005-04-20T15:24:00.000-04:00

A Godly man. A prayerful man. A humble man. A Rock. Thank you Holy Spirit.

Benedict XVI

2005-04-19T21:12:00.000-04:00

The then Cardinal Ratzinger preached this homily to the Cardinals immediately prior to entering the Conclave:

"At this hour of great responsibility, we hear with special consideration what the Lord says to us in his own words. From the three readings I would like to examine just a few passages which concern us directly at this time.The first reading gives us a prophetic depiction of the person of the Messiah – a depiction which takes all its meaning from the moment Jesus reads the text in the synagogue in Nazareth, when he says: “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4,21). At the core of the prophetic text we find a word which seems contradictory, at least at first sight. The Messiah, speaking of himself, says that he was sent “To announce a year of favor from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God” (Is 61,2). We hear with joy the news of a year of favor: divine mercy puts a limit on evil – the Holy Father told us. Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: encountering Christ means encountering the mercy of God. Christ’s mandate has become our mandate through priestly anointing. We are called to proclaim – not only with our words, but with our lives, and through the valuable signs of the sacraments, the “year of favor from the Lord”. But what does the prophet Isaiah mean when he announces the “day of vindication by our God”? In Nazareth, Jesus did not pronounce these words in his reading of the prophet’s text – Jesus concluded by announcing the year of favor. Was this, perhaps, the reason for the scandal which took place after his sermon? We do not know. In any case, the Lord gave a genuine commentary on these words by being put to death on the cross. Saint Peter says: “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross” (1 Pe 2,24). And Saint Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians: “Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’, that the blessing of Abraham might be extended to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (Gal 3, 13s).The mercy of Christ is not a cheap grace; it does not presume a trivialization of evil. Christ carries in his body and on his soul all the weight of evil, and all its destructive force. He burns and transforms evil through suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favor meet in the paschal mystery, in Christ died and risen. This is the vindication of God: he himself, in the person of the Son, suffers for us. The more we are touched by the mercy of the Lord, the more we draw closer in solidarity with his suffering – and become willing to bear in our flesh “what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1, 24).In the second reading, the letter to the Ephesians, we see basically three aspects: first, the ministries and charisms in the Church, as gifts of the Lord risen and ascended into heaven. Then there is the maturing of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, as a condition and essence of unity in the body of Christ. Finally, there is the common participation in the growth of the body of Christ - of the transformation of the world into communion with the Lord.Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards “the maturity of Christ” as it is said in the Italian text, simplifying it a bit. More precisely, according to the Greek text, we should speak of the “measure of the fullness of Christ”, to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith – only faith – which creates unity and takes form in love. On this theme, Saint Paul offers us some beautiful words - in contrast to the continual ups and downs of those were are like infants, tossed about by the waves: (he says) make truth in love, as the basic formula of Christian existence. In Christ, truth and love coincide. To the extent that we draw near to Christ, in our own life, truth and love merge. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13,1).Looking now at the richness of the Gospel reading, I would like to make only two small observations. The Lord addresses to us these wonderful words: “I no longer call you slaves…I have called you friends” (Jn 15,15). So many times we feel like, and it is true, that we are only useless servants. (cf Lk 17,10). And despite this, the Lord calls us friends, he makes us his friends, he gives us his friendship. The Lord defines friendship in a dual way. There are no secrets among friends: Christ tells us all everything he hears from the Father; he gives us his full trust, and with that, also knowledge. He reveals his face and his heart to us. He shows us his tenderness for us, his passionate love that goes to the madness of the cross. He entrusts us, he gives us power to speak in his name: “this is my body…”, “I forgive you…”. He entrusts us with his body, the Church. He entrusts our weak minds and our weak hands with his truth – the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the mystery of God who “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (Jn 3, 16). He made us his friends – and how do we respond?The second element with which Jesus defines friendship is the communion of wills. For the Romans “Idem velle – idem nolle”, (same desires, same dislikes ) was also the definition of friendship. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (Jn 15, 14). Friendship with Christ coincides with what is said in the third request of the Our Father: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. At the hour in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus transformed our rebellious human will in a will shaped and united to the divine will. He suffered the whole experience of our autonomy – and precisely bringing our will into the hands of God, he have us true freedom: “Not my will, but your will be done”. In this communion of wills our redemption takes place: being friends of Jesus to become friends of God. How much more we love Jesus, how much more we know him, how much more our true freedom grows as well as our joy in being redeemed. Thank you, Jesus, for your friendship!The other element of the Gospel to which I would like to refer is the teaching of Jesus on bearing fruit: “I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain” (Jn 15, 16). It is here that is expressed the dynamic existence of the Christian, the apostle: I chose you to go and bear fruit…”. We must be inspired by a holy restlessness: restlessness to bring to everyone the gift of faith, of friendship with Christ. In truth, the love and friendship of God was given to us so that it would also be shared with others. We have received the faith to give it to others – we are priests meant to serve others. And we must bring a fruit that will remain. All people want to leave a mark which lasts. But what remains? Money does not. Buildings do not, nor books. After a certain amount of time, whether long or short, all these things disappear. The only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. The fruit which remains then is that which we have sowed in human souls – love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching the heart, words which open the soul to joy in the Lord. Let us then go to the Lord and pray to him, so that he may help us bear fruit which remains. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.In conclusion, returning again to the letter to the Ephesians, which says with words from Psalm 68 that Christ, ascending into heaven, “gave gifts to men”
(Eph 4,8). The victor offers gifts. And these gifts are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Our ministry is a gift of Christ to humankind, to build up his body – the new world. We live out our ministry in this way, as a gift of Christ to humanity! But at this time, above all, we pray with insistence to the Lord, so that after the great gift of Pope John Paul II, he again gives us a pastor according to his own heart, a pastor who guides us to knowledge in Christ, to his love and to true joy."

2005-04-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

BE NOT AFRAID 1920-2005

This is one of my favorite pictures. Sunny day. Dirt path.
Contemplating the mysteries, rosary in hand.

John Paul II The Great

2005-04-16T09:54:00.000-04:00

Today the ninth and final novena Mass will mark the end of the official mourning period for JPII.
JPII was a man like any other but unlike any other. He made mistakes, he sinned, he went to confession.
Gifted to be sure. In the office of the Papacy he embodied with flesh and blood that unity of the Church Universal in a visible and concrete form.

But the response the past two weeks can not be explained away simply in terms of a charasmatic personality. I see the response primarily as a testament to his ability to open up a dialouge with modern man, that all that modern man sought could only be found in the person of Christ. The theological and philosphical treatment of the dignity of man made in the image and likeness of God was most clearly articulated by JPII . His expression of "Christian personalism" is grounded in seeing the human subject not as an object, not as an "it", but as a "thou". That all human beings are called by virtue of their creation in the likeness of the Holy Trinity to a self-giving exchange of love is the basis of his catechesis (the converse of course being the use of another as an object of pleasure, or simply an object to be used or conformed or destroyed by personal whim). This example of self-giving was most clearly demonstrated in the Incarnation and self-giving of God Himself for our salvation, which provides us with the grace through the merit of Christ to become "Christ-like", to sacrificially give ourselves to others. To in essence become truly human. All of this teaching toward the end of the bloodiest of centuries that reaped (and continues to reap) the consequences of a secularism and an atheistic humanism which teaches of "a man without need of God", which has led to dehumanization and exploitation of the human person in almost every conceivable form.

Certainly JPII did not teach anything "new", for it its as "old" as Genesis and as fresh as the four Gospels. He gave a mankind fraught with confusion and starving for some sense of meaning (post-failure of the "cult of man")-- HOPE, a hope that was based on the person and work of Christ as he bore witness to the Gospel by his travels and preaching throughout the whole world. Modern man listened to that message to varying degrees during his pontificate. Some have responded. Many have not responded. I believe that he left Christians a practical foundation for engaging and evangelizing a post-modern culture. I pray that we will see much greater fruit of his sacrificial self-giving in the coming decades.

2005-04-16T08:36:00.000-04:00

Our Fish

Praise

2005-04-15T21:17:00.000-04:00

I bought a little booklet titled "Praying the Psalms" written by Thomas Merton. Here follows a little excerpt I thought a few of you would enjoy.

To praise God?

Do we really know what it means to praise? To adore? To give glory?

Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets that are supposed to make life more comfortable--everything is constantly being "praised". Praise is now so overdone that everyone is sick of it, and since everything is "praised", with the official hollow enthusiasm of the radio announcer it turns out in the end that nothing is praised. Praise has become empty. Nobody really wants to use it.

Are there any superlatives left for God? They have all been wasted on foods and quack medicines. There is no word left to express our adoration of him, who alone is Holy, who alone is Lord.

So we go to Him to ask help and to get out of being punished, and to mumble that we need a better job, more money, more of the things that are praised by the advertisements. And we wonder why our prayer is so often dead--gaining its only life, borrowing its only urgency from the fact that we need these things so badly.

But we do not really think we need God. Least of all do we think we need to praise Him.

It is quite possible that our lack of interest in the Psalms conceals a secret lack of interest in God. For if we have no real interest in praising Him, it shows that we have never realized who He is. For when one becomes conscious of who God really is, and when one realizes that He who is Almighty, and infinitely Holy, has done "great things to us", the only possible reaction is the cry of a half-articulate exultation that bursts from the depths of our being in amazement at the tremendous, inexplicable goodness of God to men. The Psalms are all made up of such cries--cries of wonder, exultation, , anguish, or joy. The very concreteness of their passion makes some of them seem disjointed and senseless. Their spontaneity makes them songs without plan, because there are no blueprints for ecstacy.

Yet at the same time the Psalms are rugged and sober. Their emotions are controlled, and the very control increases their intensity. Add to this the even more plain sobriety with which the Church herself uses the Psalter, and we find that the tremendous impact of the Psalms is buried at a very deep spiritual level, and that we must pray on that level to feel it at all.

To say that the Psalms are deep is not to say that they are esoteric. One does not have to be a very unusual person in order to appreciate them. One has to be a healthy, simple person with a lot of faith and enough freedom from the tastes and predjudices of our time to be able to appreciate the imagery of another race and age. We must be, to some extent, "Orientals".

2005-04-13T17:49:00.000-04:00

Easter Vigil '04

My Birthday

2005-04-11T19:01:00.000-04:00

My brother Luke's birthday is tomorrow. Sister Abigail's is Friday. Now I share an April birthday with both of them.

Today I am a one-year-old Catholic, and sometimes I feel like exactly that. Often in the throes of Christian immaturity, barely able to walk without help, barely able express a succinct word in relation to what has been.

But being only one has its good points too. I see the world anew, everything is colored differently. I have lots of older brothers and sisters caring for me. I love my mother more deeply now. God is more like God, and not so much a creature.

I have found Love in new form, not simply a feeling, not only an ethereal spirit, but both of those with Substance plus.

Prayer. More structured now. Rosary. Hours. Novena. Psalms, lots of them. Prayer. More often now.

Worship. Not only songs or sermons or Scripture readings, though I love them all. Sacrifice, Worship.
Everyday, any day.

Books, lots and lots of them. Smaller bank account. Many read, many marginally comprehended, few put into practice.

Church, down the street around the world, "catholic". Unity in doctrine, disunity in dissent. Saints, servants, sinners, scoundrels. Paradox.

Family, fruitful.

And some fun (not so?) superficial stuff. Incense, monasteries with monks, convents of cloistered, plainsong, polyphony, grand cathedrals, humble missions, fast days, feast days.

More.

I know I have to grow up now. Young at heart I hope.

On The Road Again

2005-04-01T08:52:00.000-05:00

Today we'll be heading back home. We will see how much stuff we can stuff into our heavily- laden '92 Plymouth Acclaim. I was pretty impressed that we were able to live out of a cars' worth of junk for three months.

As the miles slip by and the Ave's are mumbled through the sorrowful mysteries I'll be praying for Pope John Paul II, in critical condition this morning. He has born his Cross well through the Nazi occupation of Poland, Communist Russia's occupation of Poland, a near fatal assasination attempt, and now Parkinson's. Just started Theology of the Body a few days ago, can't really sum it up beyond "very good". May the Peace of Christ comfort him these last few days or hours.

As to the next Abba, no one knows. They say "he who walks into the Conclave a Pope will leave as a Cardinal". In these dark days we need another shining light to lead the Church.

St. Peter, pray for us,
St. Gregory the Great, pray for us.
St. Leo the Great, pray for us
St. Innocent III, pray for us,
St. Pius X, pray for us,
All holy Apostles, Martyrs, and Doctors pray for us.

2005-03-28T18:10:00.000-05:00

Sleep In The Eyes

2005-03-28T18:03:00.000-05:00

He Will Rule With a Rod of Iron

2005-03-28T18:02:00.000-05:00

All The Angels Hail Their Risen King

Arise My Love

2005-03-28T17:49:00.000-05:00

Te Deum (from the Roman Breviary)

We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry.

Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God of Sabaoth; Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee;
The Father, of an infinite Majesty. Thine honourable, true, and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.

When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious Blood.

Make them to be numbered with thy Saints, in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
Day by day we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name ever, world without end.

Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded.

2005-03-25T08:47:00.000-05:00

Crucifixtion

2005-03-25T08:46:00.000-05:00

Carrying the Cross

Day of Atonement

2005-03-25T08:28:00.000-05:00

Psalm 22- Roman Breviary

MY God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me? and art so far from my health, and from the words of my complaint? O my God, I cry in the day-time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season also I take no rest. And thou continuest holy, O thou Worship of Israel. Our fathers hoped in thee; they trusted in thee, and thou didst deliver them. They called upon thee, and were holpen; they put their trust in thee, and were not confounded. But as for me, I am a worm, and no man; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying, He trusted in the LORD, that he would deliver him; let him deliver him, if he will have him. But thou art he that took me out of my mother's womb; thou wast my hope, when I hanged yet upon my mother's breasts. I have been left unto thee ever since I was born; thou art my God even from my mother's womb. O go not from me; for trouble is hard at hand, and there is none to help me. Many oxen are come about me; fat bulls of Bashan close me in on every side. They gape upon me with their mouths, as it were a ramping and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth to my gums, and thou bringest me into the dust of death. For many dogs are come about me, and the council of the wicked layeth siege against me. They pierced my hands and my feet: I may tell all my bones: they stand staring and looking upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. But be not thou far from me, O LORD; thou art my succour, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion's mouth; thou hast heard me also from among the horns of the unicorns. I will declare thy Name unto my brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. O praise the LORD, ye that fear him: magnify him, all ye of the seed of Jacob; and fear him, all ye seed of Israel. For he hath not despised nor abhorred the low estate of the poor; he hath not hid his face from him; but when he called unto him he heard him. My praise is of thee in the great congregation; my vows will I perform in the sight of them that fear him. The poor shall eat, and be satisfied; they that seek after the LORD shall praise him: your heart shall live for ever. All the ends of the world shall remember themselves, and be turned unto the LORD; and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before him. For the kingdom is the LORD'S, and he is the Governor among the nations. All such as be fat upon earth have eaten, and worshipped. All they that go down into the dust shall kneel before him; and no man hath quickened his own soul. My seed shall serve him: they shall be counted unto the Lord for a generation. They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, whom the Lord hath made.

2005-02-27T14:56:00.000-05:00

Creation

The Sexual Counter-Revolution

2005-02-27T13:41:00.000-05:00

What has the "liberating" sexual revolution of the 60's left us with forty years later? Enslavement would not be too strong a word for many of those in our society. Enslavement to
a sexual ethic dominated by self-gratification and the primacy of pleasure. Enslavement to pornography that treats created woman as a shallow object of pleasure. Enslavement to venereal disease (a term that sounds a bit more shocking than STD's) that slowly disfigures and saps the lifeblood away from those who have lingered outside the bounds of chastity. Emotional and psychological nightmares for life that "I allowed my baby to die", or if reflected on longer and more honestly "my very hands are guilty of the blood of my blood". The enslavement to status or material or entertainment over and above large dinner table conversations with mother and father with more than 1.7 children (conveniently avoided with pharmaceutical castration). Enslavement to divorce, and remarriage, and divorce, and now I'm rocked with lonliness trying to date again at 59, and the chicks at the bar aren't that pretty with their gritty voices. Enslavement that leads to rape, the taking of another man's wife for one's pleasure as the voices of her husband and children groan, if she is allowed to live out her shattered life. Enslavement of the old, withering away in a nursing home with no one to talk to, no children or one in California that sees me once a year. Enslavement to
old age and the loss of innocence when still so young because my babysitter the TV told me everything I need to know to go out and "do it". On and on and on and on.

So can there be a counter-revolution? Who will provide the theological and philosophical vision for such a movement to occur. I believe a white-haired elderly man currently wracked with the flu and a tracheostomy tube cut into this throat to allow him to breathe easier may have provided a solid foundation for this movement to occur. One Karol Wojtyla, the Bishop of Krakow, once wrote a book entitled "Love and Responsibility" which he later expanded and explicated upon more fully in 129 Wednesday audiences as Pope John Paul II (from 1979 to 1984) and subsequently termed the "Theology of the Body".

An eminant Catholic theologian and Papal biographer, George Weigel ("Witness to Hope"),
has stated that the Theology of the Body is “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century". I hope he is right, for we all need to be liberated, beginning with myself. I wonder how much of my personal "theology of the body", primarily informed by society at large with a few Scriptures bouncing in our out of my head during childhood, fails to capture the grand vision that God gave to our first parents.
I am going to try to dedicate the fifty days of Easter to "Love and Responsibility" and the the "Theology of the Body". I'm sure that is not enough time to begin to assimilate this rather dense teaching, but I'll try to give an update following.

If your interested, here is a website related to the "Theology of the Body". This is a quietly growing movement that I hope to be a part of.
http://www.theologyofthebody.net/

Litany of Loretto

2005-02-23T17:38:00.000-05:00

I haven't really posted anything Marian on my site so I figured why not now. Is this excessive? How eloquent is poetry allowed to become when written to someone you love? Would you restrict your passions and word choice in a hymn of love or praise to to your husband, wife, or children?

The following is medieval poetry. There is one title in the list below greater than all the rest combined, which gives life to all the others. "Mother of God"- Theotokos (lit. "God-bearer") in the East. All of the others flow from this title alone. The title received its life after the Council of Ephesus in 431 brought against Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople. He refused to call Mary the "Mother of God". Mother of Jesus, the human person of Christ- sure. Mother of God, the divine person of Christ- nope. For he was teaching that Christ was two persons, not one person with two natures. St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, bitterly opposed the Nestorian heresy. After the Council ruled that Mary was the "Mother of God" crowds of jubilant Ephesians chanted "Praised be the Theotokos, long live Cyril".

Lord have mercy on us.
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ have mercy on us.
Christ have mercy on us.
Lord have mercy on us.
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, pray for us
Holy Mother of God, pray for us
Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us
Mother of Christ, pray for us
Mother of divine grace, pray for us
Mother most pure, pray for us
Mother most chaste, pray for us
Mother inviolate, pray for us
Mother undefiled, pray for us
Mother most amiable, pray for us
Mother most admirable, pray for us
Mother of good counsel, pray for us
Mother of our Creator, pray for us
Mother of our Redeemer, pray for us
Virgin most prudent, pray for us
Virgin most venerable, pray for us
Virgin most renowned, pray for us
Virgin most powerful, pray for us
Virgin most merciful, pray for us
Virgin most faithful, pray for us
Mirror of justice, pray for us
Seat of wisdom, pray for us
Cause of our joy, pray for us
Spritual vessel, pray for us
Vessel of honor, pray for us
Singular vessel of devotion, pray for us
Mystical rose, pray for us
Tower of David, pray for us
Tower of ivory, pray for us
House of gold, pray for us
Ark of the covenant, pray for us
Gate of Heaven, pray for us
Morning Star, pray for us
Health of the sick, pray for us
Refuge of sinners, pray for us
Comforter of the afflicted, pray for us
Help of Christians, pray for us
Queen of Angels, pray for us
Queen of Patriarchs, pray for us
Queen of Prophets, pray for us
Queen of Apostles, pray for us
Queen of Martyrs, pray for us
Queen of Confessors, pray for us
Queen of Virgins, pray for us
Queen of all Saints, pray for us
Queen conceived without original sin, pray for us
Queen of the most holy Rosary, pray for us
Queen of peace, pray for us

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us.

Pray for us, most holy Mother of God,
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray.
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech you, that while meditating of the mysteries of the most holy rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

A Lenten Hymn

2005-02-18T09:02:00.000-05:00

From the Latin Breviary:

The fast, as taught by holy lore,
We keep in solemn course once more,
The fast to all men known, and bound
In forty days of yearly round.

The Law and seers that were of old
In divers ways this Lent foretold,
Which Christ, all seasons' King and Guide,
In after ages sanctified.

More sparing therefore let us make
The words we speak, the food we take,
Our sleep and mirth; yea, closer barred
Be every sense in holy guard.

Avoid the evil thoughts that roll
Like waters o'er the heedless soul;
Nor let the foe occasion find
Our souls in slavery to bind.

In prayer together let us fall,
And cry for mercy, one and all,
And weep before the Judge's feet,
And his avenging wrath entreat.

Thy grace have we offended sore
By sins, O God, which we deplore;
But pour upon us from on high,
O pardoning One, thy clemency.

Remember thou, though frail we be,
That yet thine handiwork are we;
Nor let the honour of thy Name
Be by another put to shame.

Forgive the sin that we have wrought,
Increase the good that we have sought;
That we, at length, our wanderings o'er,
May please thee here and evermore.

Grant, O thou blessed Trinity,
Grant, O essential Unity,
That this our fast of forty days
May work our profit and thy praise.

Amen.

Survival of the Fittest

2005-02-15T11:13:00.000-05:00

An article about the natural link between Darwinism and the Holocaust. I always thought that Darwinism provided the best argument for the oppression or extermination of other races.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/JacobseDarHitlerEssay.shtml

2005-02-01T10:02:00.000-05:00

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger- German Catholic Theologian

The Ratzinger Report

2005-02-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

I went to a used bookstore in Baltimore over the weekend and bought some books. Among them was an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger who is Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office or the Roman and Universal Inquisition). The interview was done in 1984, but not a whole lot has changed since 1984 so much of what he says is still very relevant. I’ll share a few excerpts below.

Chapter on Liturgy

"The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the Saints the Church has produced and the Art which has grown in Her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can She dispense with beauty in Her liturgies, the beauty which is so closely linked with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their into a place where beauty – and hence Truth – is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of Hell."

Chapter on Morality

"The now dominant mentality now attacks the very foundations of the morality of the Church, which, as I have already said, if She remains true to Herself, risks appearing like an anachronistic construct, a bothersome, alien body. Thus the moral theologians of the Western Hemisphere, in their efforts to still remain ‘credible’ in our society, find themselves facing a difficult alternative: it seems to them that they must choose between opposing modern society and opposing the Magesterium. The number of those who prefer the latter type of opposition is larger or smaller depending on how the question is posed: consequently they set out on a search for theories and systems that allow compromises between Catholicism and current conceptions. But this growing difference between the Magesterium and the ‘new’ moral theologies leads to unforeseeable consequences, also precisely for the reason that the Church with Her schools and Her hospitals still occupies an important social role (especially in America). Thus we stand before the difficult alternative: either the Church finds an understanding, a compromise with the values propounded by society which She wants to continue to serve, or She decides to remain faithful to Her own values (and in the Church’s view these are the values which protect man in his deepest needs) as the result of which She finds Herself on the margin of society."

Chapter On Separated Christians

"It will always be hard, if not impossible, for a Reformed Christian to accept the Priesthood as a Sacrament and as an indispensable precondition for the Eucharist. For to accept this he would have to accept the structure of the Church founded on apostolic succession. For the present at least, the furthest progress achieved is the acceptance of a model of the Church based on apostolic succession seen as the better solution – but not as the only and indispensable one."