"“But the image of the priest that I like is that of the priest as simply an instrument, an
instrument in the hand of the Lord – a pencil, pen or biro perhaps – with which the
Lord can write all that the Father tells him. And what he writes – if we permit him –
will most certainly be a story of unfailing love.."--Vincent Nichols
"Faithfulness of Christ, faithfulness of the Priest"
The 150th anniversary of St John Vianney’s death on August 4 is sure to be marked with a ton of really great Masses, devotions, prayers and events across the world.Seeing as Pope Benedict XVI has issued the Year for Priests, it is bound to get a good showing.
Family Publications has brought out a neat little booklet to mark the occasion which fits perfectly in one’s diary or handbag and can be whipped out in one of those spare deadly moments—say on the Tube when the driver is quoting Sartre’s “Hell is other people” aphorism over the PA system. Those are the moments when the saintly Curé’s texts and prayers as well as those for his intercession as collected in this little book come in handy.
Wanted to pray for priests but didn’t have a prayer in the right moment? Now, you can carry them around with you easily for just £4.50 this book can be yours. And it’s out now.
As the great man said himself: “The more we pray, the more we wish to pray. Like a fish which at first swims on the surface of the water and afterwards plunges down, and is always going deeper, the soul plunges, dives and loses itself in the sweetness of conversing with God. Time never seems long in prayer.”
Today is the Feast of St Thomas More and John Fisher.
I really love St Thomas More--his Dialogue of Comfort was one of my favourite texts as an undergraduate and his prayer for a sense of humour remains one of my favourites to this day.
Prayer for humour
O Lord, give me a good digestion as well as something to digest.
Give me health of body as well as the sense to keep it healthy.
Give me a holy soul, O Lord, which keeps its eyes on beauty and purity,
So that it will not be afraid on seeing sin.
Give me a soul that knows nothing of boredom, groans, and sighs.
Never let me be overly concerned for this inconstant thing that I call me.
Lord, give me a sense of humour
So that I may take some happiness from this life and share it with others.
Amen.
The Sisters of the Gospel of Life have a nice post for SS John Fisher and Thomas More with the longer Prayer of St Thomas More
"Faithfulness of Christ, faithfulness of the Priest"
Today, our Archbishop will inaugurate the Year for Priests. The Diocese of Westminster has a nice online resource where this video of Archbishop Vincent Nichols comes from.
"Faithfulness of Christ, faithfulness of the Priest"
The US Bishops' Conference is using this Icon as the image for the Year for Priests:
Archbishop Vincent Nichols will be opening the Year for Priests with a Mass at Westminster Cathedral on Friday at 5.30.
And here is the link to the Sanctuary of Ars, where St John Vianney was the parish priest.
Fr Stephen Langridge offers his thoughts on the Year for Priests over at the Southwark Vocations blog while Jane Teresa of My Heart was Restless (Arundel and Brighton) suggests you adopt a priest.
Faithfulness of Christ, faithfulness of the Priest"
Quick on the heels of the Pauline Year, Annus Sacredotalis—the Year for Priests—is almost upon us. This Friday, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we begin the year Pope Benedict XVI has dedicated to his priests—our priests.
The announcement, which came shortly before the Pope’s visit to Africa in March was very welcome, and not just because it’s also been a bit of an Annus Horribilis for the Church in general and the priesthood in particular. It answers a need that goes beyond far beyond the questions raised by the Fr Cutie scandal and the never-ending debate about priestly celibacy.
Battered left-right-and-centre, just by fault (or virtue?) of their vocation, priests need the support of their faithful. Stretched thin, burdened with admin, criticized, beaten down—both by corruption within the Church and by constant pressure from outside to conform to a society that increasingly has little time for the Church or those who serve it—priests have a hard time of it. Amid all this the call to holiness and the sacramental aspects of the priestly vocation, the proclamation of Christ, can dim and it can become difficult to remember them.
When he called the Year for Priests, in March, Pope Benedict stressed the sacramental identity of the priestly mission.
He said:” The mission is rooted in a special way in a good formation, developed in communion with uninterrupted ecclesial Tradition, without breaks or temptations of irregularity. In this sense, it is important to encourage in priests, especially in the young generations, a correct reception of the texts of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, interpreted in the light of the Church's entire fund of doctrine.
"
It seems urgent to recover that awareness that has always been at the heart of the Church's mission, which impels priests to be present, identifiable and recognizable both for their judgement of faith, for their personal virtues as well as for the habit, in the contexts of culture and of charity.”
The Holy Father has asked the faithful to remember their priests in their prayers, at Mass and with Eucharistic Adoration. The theme is “Faithfulness of Christ, Faithfulness of the priest” and it’s“a year of prayer by priests, with priests and for priests”. There are special indulgences granted as well.
There are hundreds of initiatives to mark the year for priests. On an international level, Pope Benedict will be celebrating Vespers in front of the relics of the Cure d’Ars, St John Vianney in Rome this week to inaugurate the Year for Priests. Other events and initiatives are happening on national levels, with diocesan projects and even on parish level. On the Catholic social networking site, Xt3, organizers are promoting adopting a priest for the Year for Priests. The US Bishops Conference has already produces a good web-resource for the Year for Priests, while the Congregation for Clergy website offers different prayers and reflections on the priesthood as well as urging people to consider Spiritual motherhood for priests.
The Congregation for Clergy’s Prefect Cardinal Claudio Hummes and the Secretary Monsignor Mauro Piacenza gave this interview to RomeReports.com ahead of the Year for Priests.
In Britain, the Year for Priests will be marked here on June 28, with an open air Mass at Oscott College in Birmingham Archdiocese. Archbishop Vincent Nichols is scheduled to preach. It starts at 12noon with Exposition. For more info, go here.
The National Vocations office is tying in the Year for Priests with the visit of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux in the autumn because of St Therese’s love for priests. After all, she went to the convent to “save souls and pray for priests”. They are also working on a new website with web-based resources for the Year for Priests which is to be launched in the near future.
Watch this space, there’ll be a lot more coming up on the Year for Priests.
Friday 12 June
It’s weekend time, if you’re stuck in London twiddling your thumbs over the weekend, check out Spirit in the City in Soho. Done with the participation of the four Soho Churches (St Pat’s, Notre Dame de France Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, and Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane), Spirit in the City is a three day event, with Adoration, Confession, talks, theatre and drama.
Last night St Pats was packed with young people who had come to hear Abbot Christopher Jamison of Worth Abbey. Tonight, there’s a Mass at 7pm at Corpus Christi and a Eucharistic Procession at 8pm from Covent Garden to Leicester Square. Then Fr Stephen Wang, of Allen Hall Seminary will lead the Catechesis session at the French Church from 8.45 onwards.
Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, parish priest at St Patrick’s says that the three day event is an incredible witness to the Faith. He urges everyone to go and check out the plays and the concerts and the Adoration and Confessions tents that will be set up in Leicester Square tomorrow from midday to 8pm.
We’ve had “Being Church” and “Making Church” and now there’s “Being Eucharist!” But “Being Eucharist” is deceptive—it’s no catch phrase cooked up in a dank “We are Church” office in Saxony. No. “Being Eucharist!” has come straight from the man himself, our very own Benedetto, and on no less exciting a day than the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.
Leading the procession in Rome yesterday—here the Solemnity is transferred to the Sunday—Pope Benedict addressed himself particularly to priests only a week before the Year for Priests begins and called on them to be Eucharist.
He said:
“I speak to you in particular, my dear priests, who Christ chose so that together with him you can live your live in sacrifice and praise for the salvation of the world. Only through union with Christ will you be able to draw on a spiritual wealth that generates hope for your pastoral ministry. St. Leo the Great reminds us that our participation in the Body and Blood of Christ only aims to become what we receive’ (Sermo 12, De Passione 3,7, PL 54). If this is true for every Christian, it is to an even greater degree for us priests.
“Being Eucharist! This must be our constant desire and duty so that the sacrifice of our existence accompanies our offering of the Body and Blood of Christ at the altar. Every day, from the Body and Blood of the Lord we find that free and pure love that renders us worthy ministers of the Christ and witnesses of its joy.
" It is this that the faithful expect in a priest: the example of an authentic devotion for the Eucharist; they love to see him spend long moments of silence and adoration in front of Jesus as did the Holy Curé of Ars, whom we will particularly remember during the imminent Year for Priests. ...”
In Benedict’s native Germany, Corpus Christi is a very big deal and a public holiday in a number of the Laender. Munich’s procession, which usually starts at the Mariensaeule on the Marienplatz and goes through the city, was apparently held in the Cathedral this year because of inclement weather.
Normally several thousand people gather to take part in an outdoor Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Munich and Freising and follow the Blessed Sacrament through the streets, singing and praying. It’s a wonderful thing to see and to be part of. The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ was instituted in 1264 by Pope Urban IV. In Munich, the first “Fronleichnam” procession took place in 1318.
I came across this picture of Pope Benedict on PA when he was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich and Freising.
Most people will have come across the LOLCats phenomenon: cute pictures of cute cats with cutesy misspelled capshuns on Icanhascheezburger.com. So beloved is this, that it has expanded to dogs andsaints. Mac McLernon over at Mulier Fortis is a fan.
Hardened old internet buffs will yawn at my latest discovery on the interweb. Old hat, surely, but I must admit amusement.
It is only natural in these heady days of the vernacular, that the Bible should be translated into the LOLCat-ese. And like always, somebody, somewhere, has way too much time on their hands.
For the Holy Trinity read “Ceiling Cat”, “Happy Cat” and “Hover Cat”. The angels are “Bird Catz”, human beings are “Kittehs” and Satan is “Basement Cat”.
In LOLCat-ese famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13 reads:
“4)Luv is pashient n kind, luv haz no jelusniss or showin offz, luv no is stuck-up 5)or r00dz. Luv no insistzes on doin it 4 itzelf, itz not pisst off alla tiem or rezentflufflele.
"6)Luv izzn all happiez about doin it wrong, but is happiez about teh truthz.7) Luv putz up wiht all teh stuffz, beelivez all teh stuffz, hoepz for all teh stuffz. Luv putz up wiht all teh stuffz... i sed that areddy?
“8) Luv no haz endingz. Tellin the futurez, tungz, an alla stuffz u know wil die. 9)We haz knowingz a bit, an we haz profacy a bit. We no haz two much tho.10) O, wait. Win teh perfict coemz, teh not perfict will dyez, lolol.
"11) Wen i wuz a kitten, i meweded leik a kitten, thinkded liek a kittenz, an I chazed strings liek a kittenz. Wen i wuz becomez a cat, i NO WANT kitten waiz ne moar.12) For nao we see in teh foggy mirorr like when teh human gets out of teh shower, but tehn we see faec tow faec. Nao i haz knowingz just a bit, tehn i will haz all teh knowingz, as i haz been knownz.
“13) Nao faithz an hoepz an luvz r hear, theses threes, but teh bestest iz teh luv. srsly.”
Surrogacy seems to be the catchword of the moment, what with the gaunt but glamorous (and aging) SJP (Sarah Jessica Parker for the uninitiated) expecting twins to be delivered for her. And—for Londoners at least—the block-letters of the Evening Standard posters which scream: “Couple buy child from India ‘baby factory'”do make the issue almost unavoidable.
Infertility is a terrible thing. And when modern science finds a way around it, then surely couples who love each other should be able to avail themselves to the technology that can not only provide them with a child but also one that shares at least part of their DNA. The problem seems like it is not insuperable. Many infertile couples see in vitro fertilization or in extreme cases gestational surrogacy as the answer to their reproductive woes.
For Catholics, of course, neither is an option. The Vatican stressed this again in its instruction Dignitas Personae, issued last winter, which argued that “procreation vis-à-vis the child to be born must be the ‘fruit of a marriage’”. Anything that involves IVF like "gestational surrogacy" is therefore out of the question as is "traditional surrogacy".
But headlines swirling around the Sex and the City star’s long expected progeny make it clear that gestational surrogacy is not only here to stay, but has even become fashionable. Ms Parker has tried but failed to conceive a child with her husband and so has chosen a 26-year-old surrogate to bear twin girls which share her DNA to term for her.
Gestational surrogacy is essentially womb rental and differs from traditional surrogacy where half of the chromosomes belongs to the child-bearer (think Abraham and Hagar) because the embryo doesn’t need to share in the bearer’s DNA at all. While Ms Parker is the smiling face of this Janus-like phenomenon, its darker aspect (the reality beyond the theory) is becoming increasingly evident as the economy worsens.
As families in the United States gear up to face the recession there are reports that “even wanted babies” are being aborted and surrogate mothers in those states where it is a payable service are not necessarily being paid. The chilling expression, “fetal foreclosure” is being used to describe a phenomenon that could become a reality. Slate Magazine reported the story , but I came across segments of the article over at the Intentional Disciples blog first.
It describes a scenario that developing in California: Couples and surrogate mothers who were brought together by a brokering company called Surrogenesis "dedicated to assisting infertile couples to have a baby through third-party assisted reproduction.". The company took money in installments from the parents in trust in order to pay for the “third-party assisted” reproduction. Both surrogate mothers and expectant parents were notified that the money had evaporated. In short parents and surrogates were the victims of a financial scam—the money is gone, but the surrogate mothers are still pregnant.
The Slate article continues:
“On one level, this looks like any other financial scandal. But the pregnancies add a whole new dimension. Around 70 people are affected. At least one pregnancy plan was reportedly suspended just before extracting the eggs that were to be used. In two other reported cases, the surrogates are in their third trimester. But what about the pregnancies in the middle—too late to call off the fertilization or implantation but not too late for abortion?
“Some couples have managed to pay, out of their own funds, the monthly installments that the companies had promised to the surrogates. But others can't. Andrew Vorzimer, a lawyer involved in the case, says, "We've got couples in the midst of pregnancies with no ability to pay the surrogate.
“Surrogates aren't mercenaries. But they do need to be paid for their sacrifices. With every week that passes, they endure more of pregnancy's burdens. They submit to exams, tests, and other procedures. They take on serious medical risks. They forgo activities that might harm the fetus. They lose the ability to commute to and work at other jobs. They have bills to pay. At least one abandoned surrogate says she has received an eviction notice.
“If you stop paying your surrogate, she needs to quit and find another job, just like any other worker. But surrogacy isn't like any other job. The only way to quit a pregnancy is to abort it.”
In this case, Slate informs us that all the surrogate mothers are willing to carry the children to term…but it leaves one thinking doesn’t it?
Not sure why, but Mgr Ronald Knox's limerick about Bishop Berkeley's philosophy has been stuck in my head all morning.
For your edification and amusement, here it is:
There was a young man who said: God,
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad.
The reply:
Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.
For those of you still wondering what to do this weekend, the annual Tyburn Pilgrimage is taking place on Sunday. You’ll have seen it over on the Mulier Fortis but I’m just mentioning it again.
This year marks the 100th Tyburn Walk and Mac McLernon says it’s likely to be the last one because too few people come. If there is any way you can make it, please do go. If you haven’t been at the Catholic Underground gig for too long the night before that is…
Organised by The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, the pilgrimage starts on Sunday at 2:30 at the churchyard of St Sepulchre’s, diagonally opposite the Old Bailey. Then it goes and stops in various London churches, including St Elthedreda’s Ely Place and St Patrick’s Soho Square. Described in full here.
We've heard reports about Masses and devotions being cancelled in Mexico as swine flu fears grow. This seems to be the sort of situations where even the saints need the protection of a face mask.
H/T to Deacon Greg Kandra of Deacon's Bench
In last week’s paper we ran a story about a newly discovered document by Pope John Paul II which had never been published outside of Poland before. Prepared for the instruction of married couples in the archdiocese of Krakow shortly after Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae came out, the document had been discovered by a student at the John Paul II Institute for Life and Family and had been translated by Il Messagero we wrote .
The newspaper published a version of the Italian translation last week. Written by Karol Wojtyla, the booklet is based on the then Archbishop of Krakow’s pastoral experiences with couples and was written at approximately the same time as the publication of Humanae Vitae . He suggested couples should become members of Humanae Vitae groups.
The purpose of these groups:
"The essential goal of 'Humanae vitae' marriage groups is ongoing effort aimed at achieving such a spiritual integrity that the integral teaching of Christ the Lord on marriage and the family proclaimed by the Church may be implemented in their marriages with full understanding and love.
"The aim, therefore, is to forge the required spirituality, that is interior life, which will enable married and family life to be lived in a Christian way. Such a spirituality is not available in a 'ready to live' form like the spirituality of various religious orders, but must be worked out in an ongoing fashion. Forging such a spirituality is also a very important task for these marriage groups. The means to achieve this lies in the practise of that spiritual attitude described above (the spirit of the evangelical counsels) by the individual married couples within a group."
When we ran the piece, we weren’t sure whether there would be an English translation.
As it turns out, Edmund Adamus, director of Pastoral Affairs for the Diocese of Westminster came across the same Polish text last summer while doing some research for a talk. He’s commissioned an English version and it appears on the website for the National Association of Catholic Families website.
It will also be included as a resource at the back of A Pure Heart Create for Me, a book which incorporates the lecture series held at St Patrick’s Soho Square last summer commemorating Humanae Vitae.
The book is due to be published by Family Publications and is expected out this summer.
Only a few weeks ago “Little Ratzinger” as Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera the head of the Congregation of Divine Worship is known, praised Lancaster’s Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue for his Fit for Mission? Church, but last week, Bishop O’Dononghue met with the real one. First praise from the Pontifical Councils for Justice and Peace and for the Family then the Congregations for Doctrine of the Faith, Divine Worship, and Clergy and now from the Boss himself.
PO’D, as he is affectionately known, presented the Holy Father with a copy of his Fit for Mission? Marriage, the last document in the Fit for Mission series, which is being published by the CTS. Frs Blake and Finigan have already posted pics but I liked this one.
According to Fr Robert Billing (the bishop's secretary), Benedict XVI departed from protocol last Wednesday after the general audience by going through Fit for Mission with Bishop O’Donoghue at some length and thanked him for all the work he had done in the diocese.
On March 22, a number of the world’s media outlets reported something along the lines of “ Far-right youths carrying placards reading ‘leave my Pope alone’ clashed with left-wing activists outside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris after the latter had thrown condoms on the square as worshippers were leaving Sunday mass.”
The Associated Press, AFP and Reuters were among the news-wires which used the term “far right” to describe the young people protesting in favour of the Pope.
A group of about 30 demonstrators belonging to a group called Act Up had chosen a major Sunday Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral as an opportunity to hand out condoms in protest over the Pope’s remarks during his trip to Africa. A couple of Catholic youngsters had got wind of the protest and started to stage a counter demonstration which involved singing the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Marys. It came to blows and the police got involved. Eleven people were arrested.
But the use of the term “far right” was puzzling. Although there are certain groups of the far right in France associated with fringe Catholic movements, these just looked like normal kids who were losing their temper in the face of provocation. I’ve been trying to find out more about them. Were they really “far right” youths or just normal practicing Catholics who were fed up with having their Pope attacked from almost every corner?
Maylis Guillier, a reporter from the French Catholic newspaper, La Famile Chretienne says that they were just a bunch of practicing Catholics who were fed up with hearing the Pope viciously attacked from every corner.
Touche pas a mon Pape—don’t touch my Pope--read the white and gold badges, shaped like a hand giving the peace sign. Groups of French youngsters—maybe not in their hundred-of-thousands but certainly in their thousands—have decided that they’ve had enough of the battering Pope Benedict has been getting and have taken to the streets. Le Monde calls them the Pope’s new hussars ---they populate Facebook groups which range from “Generation Benoit XVI” which has 3,212 members to the Papal support group which has about 15,366 members. They sign petitions in support of him, one group has launched a new website (which has yet to be developed), and another plans peaceful prayer sessions in protest.
Last weekend, Miss Guillier says, a number of young Catholics decided to pray outside the closest Cathedral to show their support for the Pope. At Notre Dame, she says approximately 300 people showed up to big-up BXVI on Palm Sunday, not huge, but still a good effort, nevertheless.
Some years ago living in Manhattan I braved a bus from East Harlem to go up to Yonkers, just north of the Bronx—not that it was scary in real terms, just new. A few days earlier I had met some of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the Bronx, where I was reporting. They suggested I come along to something they called the Catholic Underground.
It felt late when the bus pulled up on a slip road on the side of the highway. There was a lonely diner and a deserted motorway bridge which I crossed into a sleepy darkened suburb on a Saturday night. Most of the lights were out. Had I got the wrong place?
A Franciscan Friar of the Renewal on his Sax in January 2006
The church was open, but empty. I was ready to leave, deeply disappointed, when I heard noise coming from the basement. Venturing down I was surprised to discover around 500 people—mainly young—kneeling for Adoration.
It was the first time I’d taken part in Adoration and I was bowled away. Sure, it wasn’t really my sort of music or my sort of scene—lots of cool young people, lots of cool music, and energy—but Holy Hour was reverent and beautiful.
It was followed by a Catholic ska-band—some MC'ing by the younger friars—coffee, donuts and chats. I spoke to one woman from Maryland who was there with her two daughters. They had driven five hours to get there and didn’t regret it. A friar I spoke to said they were planning to expand the project to New Jersey and maybe a couple of other places. The energy was great, the people were lovely and at around 10.30pm, the jamming stopped for Compline and a great Salve Regina in Latin to finish it all off. My ride back into East Harlem—after a coffee in the empty blue-lit diner—was tired and happy.
That was way back in January 2006 (which was apparently, according to this Chicago Tribune article when the movement was getting started—get me on the vanguard of a trend), but it remains etched very clearly in my memory.
The friars were young and knew what it was about—this was not some sort of wishy-washy adult attempt to make religion attractive for young people—rather it was about serious prayer and serious contemporary music by people who were convinced by both.
The first evening is going to be this Saturday, March 28, at Holy Ghost Church at 7.30 36 Nightingale Square, Balham SW12.
Br John Bosco of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal is in charge of the music for Holy Hour and performers afterwards include soloist Dr Iver and the New Jerusalem Project as well as Christian rapper Ejiro.
Fr Federico Lombardi holds up the papal tortoise aboard the papal aeroplane. (PA Photos)
Popes, political leaders and other potentates are wont to receive strange and often symbolic gifts. Ancient rituals of symbolic gift giving continue to flourish. At diplomatic meetings, on official visits and openings, gifts are exchanged as a token gesture of goodwill or to send a message.
One need but think back to the uproar over Gordon Brown’s visit to America and the puzzled disappointment of the British media when the US president gave the British Prime Minister a boxed set of DVDs, whereas the latter had presented the former with a series of thoughtful presents. Remember the offense caused when Vladimir Putin—a notorious dog lover—presented Germany’s Angela Merkel—who is famous for her dislike of pooches--with a toy Labrador? Still, in the minefield of protocol and state meetings, there is always room for the odd oddity, curiosity and cross-cultural pollination.
“Shell out for African Pope” the Sun’s headline pronounced at the latest official gift the Pope has been given. No stranger to unusual gifts, Pope Benedict was presented with a tortoise in a basket by a group of Baka Pygmies who gave him an unscheduled send-off from Cameroon last week. I’m not sure whether one can read deep messages into the gift of a tortoise (“It’s a metaphor for Pope Benedict’s approach to the Church, a slow dogged move forward with a heavy protective shell.” “It’s a symbol for…” etc etc etc ad nauseam). At any rate appears that tortoises are quite important to Baka Pygmy culture as a symbol of wisdom—they even have a special dance called the tortoise dance.
By the end of the Papal trip to Africa, the little tortoise will have travelled farther and faster than it would have ever imagined in its wildest dreams—from Yaounde to Luanda in a morning (first class)—and perhaps from thence to the Vatican, where it might live in the Vatican gardens.
It seems there was some confusion as to what happened to the tortoise after its official presentation.
The Catholic News Service reported with wry amusement:
“The fate of the turtle was a little unclear at first. Vatican officials aboard the papal plane to Angola told reporters it had been left behind in Cameroon.
“But a few minutes later, the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, walked into the journalist section of the plane carrying the turtle in a woven cage. Reporters snapped photos as the brown turtle, about eight inches long, poked its head out from under its shell.
“The spokesman said he wasn't sure if the turtle would make the return trip to Rome and take up residence in the Vatican. He suggested it might find a home in the Vatican gardens.”
Other strange and wonderful papal gifts have included a New Holland tractor built in Essex which was given to BXVI in 2007 to pull platforms on St Peter’s Square for public audiences. Pope Benedict’s bespoke T7050 was painted white and gold, with the papal coat of arms on the wheels. John Paul II was given a record of a Finnish Literature professor signing Elvis in Latin. "It's Now or Never" became "Nunc hic aut numquam" and “Don’t be cruel” became “Ne Saevias".
Apparently the Holy Father is also often presented with neckties for some reason.
Fathers seem to get short shrift when it comes to celebrating Fathers' Day. Mothers always seem to be lavished with gifts, flowers, macaroni necklaces on Mothering Sunday whereas fathers tend to get a drawing or a card or something if they’re lucky.
Sure, as my parents were wont to say when we presented them with cold scrambled eggs in bed—inevitably bits of shell would find their way into morning’s work and make it inedible—“Fathers' Day [Mothers' Day] should be every day”, but wouldn’t it be great if we celebrated our fathers on the Solemnity of St Joseph? So I thought as I bumped along London’s potholes on my bicycle this morning.
Apparently, it turns out, we already do. This is presumably old hat to those who aren’t the Children of the Spirit of Vatican II. It was news to me. According to that great source of collective wisdom, Wikipedia, “In the Roman Catholic tradition, Fathers are celebrated on Saint Joseph's Day, commonly called Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, though in most countries Father's Day is a secular celebration.”
The Holy Father (and it’s his name day too, I reckon) spoke about the importance of St Joseph as a father during yesterday’s vespers.
Pope Benedict said:”He [St Joseph] is not the biological father of Jesus, whose Father is God alone, and yet he lives his fatherhood fully and completely. To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth. Saint Joseph, in this sense, gave proof of great devotion. For the sake of Christ he experienced persecution, exile and the poverty which this entails. He had to settle far from his native town. His only reward was to be with Christ. His readiness to do all these things illustrates the words of Saint Paul: ‘It is Christ the Lord whom you serve’.”
“What is important is not to be a useless servant, but rather a “faithful and wise servant”. The pairing of the two adjectives is not by chance. It suggests that understanding without fidelity, and fidelity without wisdom, are insufficient. One quality alone, without the other, would not enable us to assume fully the responsibility which God entrusts to us.”
He also drew a parallel between St Joseph’s fatherhood and the fatherhood lived by priests.
There have been a number of blog posts about St Joseph, so I can’t name them all: Rocco Palmo has a neat one with a prayer .
The Mulier Fortis mentions that the Sisters of the Gospel of Life have started the Confraternity of St Joseph which sounds like a great thing in the making.
The Dominican students--yes, I know GodzDogz get over-proportionate representation on this blog, but theirs is fantastic--had a nice reflection on St Joseph and lovely photograph by Br Lawrence Lew.
Pope Benedict arrived in Cameroon this afternoon. This is his first visit to Africa.
In his first speech he said: "Even amid the greatest suffering, the Christian message always brings hope. The life of Saint Josephine Bakhita offers a shining example of the transformation that an encounter with the living God can bring to a situation of great hardship and injustice. In the face of suffering or violence, poverty or hunger, corruption or abuse of power, a Christian can never remain silent.
" The saving message of the Gospel needs to be proclaimed loud and clear, so that the light of Christ can shine into the darkness of people’s lives. Here in Africa, as in so many parts of the world, countless men and women long to hear a word of hope and comfort. Regional conflicts leave thousands homeless or destitute, orphaned or widowed.
"In a continent which, in times past, saw so many of its people cruelly uprooted and traded overseas to work as slaves, today human trafficking, especially of defenceless women and children, has become a new form of slavery. At a time of global food shortages, financial turmoil, and disturbing patterns of climate change, Africa suffers disproportionately: more and more of her people are falling prey to hunger, poverty, and disease. They cry out for reconciliation, justice and peace, and that is what the Church offers them. Not new forms of economic or political oppression, but the glorious freedom of the children of God.
"Not the imposition of cultural models that ignore the rights of the unborn, but the pure healing water of the Gospel of life. Not bitter interethnic or interreligious rivalry, but the righteousness, peace and joy of God’s kingdom, so aptly described by Pope Paul VI as the civilization of love.
In a rather terrible moment of irony thieves stole the statue of St Patrick off a side altar in a Soho church named after him only hours before the vigil Mass in his honour yesterday.
As the students at the St Patrick's Evangelisation School prepared England's oldest church named after St Patrick for the vigil Mass, they noticed that the statue had disappeared from the side-altar. The patron saint of the church had simply vanished.
"Whoever took the statue just moved the flowers out of the way and lifted the statue off the side altar," said Monica O'Shea who is in charge of fundraising at the church.
St Patrick's Soho Square also was one of the first Catholic Churches to be established after the passing of the Catholic Relief Acts the 18th century and served the Irish community around Soho Square.
Despite the disappearance of the statue, the Mass took place that evening with Westminster's auxiliary Bishop George Stack as the chief celebrant and con-celebrated by 25 priests.
At the vigil Mass Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, the parish priest, told surprised parishioners who weren't sure how to reeact that people had decided to help the imminent move of the church furniture while St Patrick's is being renovated, by removing the statue of St Patrick from the side altar.
After Mass I overheard someone commenting, "I wonder whether St Patrick hasn't just wandered down to the local Irish pub and is waiting there for us to find him with a pint of Guiness in his hand."
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor celebrated the first Mass on St Patrick's day at Soho Square .
The 18th century church is in serious need of restoration and has been conducting an appeal to raise £3 million.
The Holy Father's letter, sections of which have already appeared, in full, translated from the version which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Dear brothers in episcopal service!
The lifting of the excommunications for the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in the year 1988 without the mandate of the Holy See caused an uproar led with a ferocity which we haven’t seen for a long time, both within and outside of the Catholic Church for a multiplicity of reasons. Many bishops felt helpless faced with an event that came unexpectedly and that could barely fit positively into the questions and duties of the Church of today. Even though many shepherds and faithful were willing to gauge the Pope’s desire for reconciliation as fundamentally positive, the question of the appropriateness of such a gesture in the face of the real priorities of faithful life in our time stood against it.
A variety of groups on the other hand openly accused the Pope of wanting to reverse the Council; an avalanche of protests set itself into motion, the bitterness of which has made wounds visible which reached far further than the instance. So I feel pushed, dear confreres, to direct a clarifying word towards you, that should help to understand the intentions which led me and the respective organs of the Holy See in this step. In this way I hope to help to bring peace to the Church.
One of the for me not foreseeable glitch/breakdown existed therein that the lifting of the excommunication was overshadowed by the Williamson Case. The quiet gesture of mercy towards four validly but not licitly ordained bishops appeared suddenly to be something completely different: as a rejection of the Christian-Jewish reconciliation, as a retraction of that on which matter the Council declared it to be the direction/path of the Church.
From an invitation to reconciliation for an ecclesiastical group that was separating itself from the Church, it became in this way the opposite, a seeming backtracking behind all the steps to the reconciliation between Christians and Jews which have been made since the Council—with which I have made it the goal of my theological work from the beginning to walk along with and move ahead.
I can only deeply lament the fact that this superimposition of two conflicting processes entered and for a moment disrupted the peace between Christians and Jews as well as the peace of the Church. I understand/hear, that careful following of the news available/accessible from the internet might have allowed one to become aware of the problem in time. I have learned from it that we at the Holy See shall have to be more watch this source of news more attentively in the future. I was saddened that also Catholics, who really should have known better, felt the need to lash out at me with jump-ready enmity. All the more do I thank the Jewish friends who helped to quickly rid the world of the misunderstanding and to re-establish the atmosphere of friendship and trust which—as in days of Pope John Paul II—also continued to exist through the whole period of my Pontificate and God be praised, will continue to exist.
A further mishap that I honestly regret exists therein that the border and the extent of the measure of January 21, 2009 which were not clearly enough explained with the publication of the process. The excommunications concern the persons, not the institutions. The concecration of bishops without a Papal mandate signals the danger of a schism because it calls into question the unity of the College of bishops with the Pope. Therefore the Church has to react with the severest punishment, excommunication, in order to to call back those that were thus punished to penitence and so to unity. Twenty years after the consecrations this goal has sadly still not been achieved. The lifting of the excommunications serves the same goal as the punishment itself; to once again invite the four bishops to return. This gesture was possible after the involved parties expressed their fundamental acknowledgement of the Pope and his power as shepherd, even though with the exception of that which deals with obedience to his teaching authority and against that of the Council. With that I return to distinction between person and institution. The dissolution of the excommunication was a measure in the area of Church Discipline: The persons were freed from the weight on their conscience of the heaviest Church punishment. This disciplinary field should be distinguished from the doctrinal area. That the Society of St Pius X has no canonical status in the Church does not actually rest on a disciplinary but on a doctrinal foundation. As long as the Society has no canonical status in the church, their holders of office do not hold legal offices in the Church.
One must also differentiate between the persons as persons disciplinary level and the doctrinal level, with which both office and institution are in question. To repeat: so long as the doctrinal questions are not clarified, the society has no canonical status in the Church and therefore for that time its office holders, even if they are freed from the punishment of the Church, hold/practice no legal offices in the Church.
In the face of the situation, I intend to combine the Papal Commission Ecclesia Dei which has, since 1988, been responsible for those communities and persons, who have come from the Society of St Pius X or similar groups and would like to return to full communion with the Pope, with the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. This should make clear that the problems that are now to be dealt with are of a doctrinal nature, especially that which deals with acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and the post-Concilliar teaching of the Pope. The collegial organs, with which the Congregation deals with the incidental questions (especially the regular meeting of the Cardinals on Wednesdays and the one to two yearly full meeting) guaranty that the prefects of the different Roman Congregations and the world wide episcopate will be brought into any decisions that will be made. One cannot freeze the teaching authority of the Church in the year 1962—the society has to be clear about that. But some of those who play the great defenders of the Council, need to be reminded that the Second Vatican Council carries with it the whole teaching history of the Church. Whoever wants to be obedient to it, must accept the faith of centuries and may not cut the roots from which the tree lives.
I hope, dear brothers, that the positive meaning as well as the the boundaries of the measures of January 21, 2009 have been clarified.But now the question remains: Was it necessary? Was it really a priority? Are there not more important things? Naturally there are more important and urgent things. I think that I have made the priorities of this pontificate clear in my speeches at its beginning. What I said then remains my unchanged guidelines.
The Lord unmistakably fixed the first priority for the successor of Peter at the Last Supper. “You however strengthen your brothers” (Lk 222, 32) Peter himself formulated this priority in his first letter anew: “Be constantly ready, to give everyone a speech and answer, who asks for the Hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3,15) In our days, in which our faith threatens in broad stretches of the world to be extinguished like a flame which no longer finds food, it is the highest priority to make God present in this world and to open the access to God. Not just to any God, but to the God who spoke on the Sinai, to the God whose face in the love to the end (John 13,1) is recognized in the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. The actual problem of our point in history is that God is disappearing out of humankind’s horizon and with the extinguishing of the from God-coming-light the lack/inability to of direction breaks into humanity, the distructive effects of which we are seeing ever more of.
Bringing mankind to God, the God who speaks in the Bible, is the highest and most fundamental priority of the Church and the successor of Peter in these times. That we should be occupied with the unity of the Faithful will arise from that on its own. For her quarrel, her inner contradiction/disaccord—calls the speech of God into question. For that reason the struggle for a common witness of faith of Christians—for Ecumenism—is included in the highest priority. To that also comes the necessity that all those who believe in God search for peace together, attempt to come closer to one another in order to, through the variety of the their image of God, approach the source fo the Light together—the interreligious dialogue. Whoever proclaims God as love until the end must give the witness of love: turned towards the suffering in love, stave off hatred and enmity, the social dimension of the Christian Faith, of which I spoke in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est.
If the struggle for faith, hope and love in the world represents the true priority for the Church in this our (and always in different forms), then the smaller and the larger reconciliations also make up a part of it. We need to recognize that the quiet gesture of an outstretched hand became such a great noise and so exactly the opposite of reconciliation. But now I still ak: Was and is it really wrong to come towards the brother “who bears a grudge against you” and attempt reconciliation (Cf. Mt 5, 23f)?
Should civilized society not also attempt to anticipate radicalization, to tie back her potential agents, if it is possible, with the great creative force of social life in order to prevent seclusion and all its consequences? Can it be completely wrong to strive for solutions to cramps and narrowing and to give room for the positive and which can be tied into the whole? I myself experienced in the years after 1988 how much the internal climate of communities which were breaking away from Rome changed through their homecoming; how the homecoming into a great broad and common church overcame one-sidedness and unraveled knots, so that positive strength for the whole came out of them.
Can we be apathetic about a communityin which there are 491 priests, 215 seminarians, six seminaries, 88 schools, two university institutes, 117 brothers and 164 sisters? Should we really allow them to drift away from the church with quiet minds. I think for example of the 491 priests. We cannot know the weave of their motivations. But I think that they would not have chosen the priesthood if the love to Christ and the will to proclaim him and with him the living God. Should we simply exclude them from the search for reconciliation and unity as the representatives of a radical fringe group? What would happen then?
To be sure, we have for a long time and again on this given occasion heard many discordant notes from representatives of this community—arrogance and condescension, obsessing into the one-sided-nesses and so on. To this I need to add for the sake of the Truth that I have also received a series of moving proofs of gratitude in which an opening of hearts was noticeable.
But should the larger Church not also be able to be generous in the knowledge of the long breath that it has, in the knowledge of the promise that was given to it? Should we not, like righteous educators, be able to overhear many an offense and strain ourselves to quietly lead out of the impasse? And must we not admit that discord has also come from Church circles? Sometimes one has the impression that our society needs at least one group to which it needs to show no tolerance, which one is allowed to attack with hatred, unquestioned. And whoever dares to touch them—in this case the Pope— has also himself lost the right to tolerance and was allowed to be thought of with hatred, without shyness or restraint.
Dear brothers, in the days in which I bethought myself to write this letter, it so happened that I had to explain and comment on a section from Gal 5,13-15 in the seminary in Rome. I was surprised who directly the sections spoke of the present of that hour : “Do not take freedom as an excuse for the flesh, but serve one another in love. The whole law is summarized in the one world: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And when you bite and rip each other apart, then take care that you do not kill each other.” I was always inclined to see this sentence as one of those rhetorical hyperbole that occasionally appear in St Paul. In some ways it may well be. But unfortunately that “biting and ripping” is also present in the Church today as an expression of a badly understood notion of freedom.
Is it an wonder that we are not better than the Galatians? That we are at least threatened by the same temptations? That we need to learn the right uses of freedom anew? And that we always have to newly learn that highest priority: Love?
On that day, on which I had to speak about it at the seminary, Rome celebrated the feast of the Madonna della Fiducia, Our Lady of Trust. Indeed Mary teaches us trust. She leads us to the Son, whom we may all trust. He will lead us—even in turbulent times. So as I conclude I would like tho thank the many bishops who gave me moving tokens of trust and sympathy, but above all gave your prayers. This thanks also goes to all the faithful who gave me witness of their unchanging loyalty to th successor of St Peter. The Lord protect us all and leads in the path of freedom. That is a wish that has risen spontaneously, especially now at the beginning of Lent, a liturgical time when the inner cleansing is particularly beneficial and which invites us all to look with new hope at the glowing destination of the Easter feast.
With a special apostolic blessing I remain
Yours in the Lord
Bishop Richard Williamson’s apology issued yesterday is not enough, the Vatican says today.
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel Fr Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s spokesman said today that the letter published by Bishop Williamson yesterday, addressed neither to the Vatican’s Secretariate of State nor to the Ecclesia Dei Commission did not fulfill the conditions demanded by the Vatican.
Fr Lombardi said, “As it appears, [the letter] does not meet the conditions set by the Vatikan Secretariat of State”.
On February 4, the Secretariat of State had issued a document clarifying the lifted excommunications. One of the points it made was:
“Bishop Williamson, to be admitted to episcopal functions in the Church, must also distance himself in an absolutely unmistakable and public way from his position on the Shoah, which was unknown to the Holy Father in the moment of the lifting of the excommunication.”
The British Lefebvrist bishop was forced to leave Argentina this week, wearing a clericals and a black baseball cap with the Sacred Heart on it, hassled by photographers. He landed in London on Wednesday and his statement appeared yesterday on Rorate Caeli blog and on Zenit, the Catholic news wire.
The statement said: "The Holy Father and my Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, have requested that I reconsider the remarks I made on Swedish television four months ago, because their consequences have been so heavy.
"Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them."
Fr Ray Blake, over at St Mary Magdalen, has commented strongly.
Our friends over at Pew Research have looked at the data from their US Religious Landscape Survey and have discovered something we never knew. “Women are more religious than men on a variety of measures” apparently. Eighty six per cent of women polled were affiliated with a religion to 79 per cent of the men—there are also more women certain in their belief that there is a God—more women pray, more women say religion is important in their lives and are certain about the existence of a personal God.
Well, quelle surprise? Anyone been in the back of a Church lately and looked at the congregation?
Speaking on the subject of missions and missionaries, I met--now quite some time ago--a wonderful young priest called Fr Giuseppe Cardamone, one of The Servants of the Poor of the Third World "Opus Christi Salvatoris Mundi".
His movement, which was founded in 1983 by Fr Giovanni Salerno, a priest who had spent 18 years ministering to the poor and sick in the Andes. The movement which also involves lay missionaries, seeks to serve the poor and show the testimony of Christ.
Fr Giuseppe is in England, trying to raise awareness for the movement and to also give a vocational retreat for young men at Abbotswick House of Prayer in Brentwood, which starts this Friday.
Not sure they still have space but for more information servantsofthepoor dot uk @ gmail.com. Tonight he gives a talk in London to the Young Oratory entitled "Giving to the poor the riches of the Church".
A few weeks ago the New York Times carried an article describing Spain as the battleground for the Church’s future. In the piece, Fr Federico Lombardi said: “It’s a critical point in the church’s confrontation against secularization in Europe and in the Western world.”
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s radical political agenda has had the effect of polarizing the Church, which has been forced to become increasingly political in the last few years. Bishops and Government have been at loggerheads over gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia. Although 90 per cent of the population get their children baptized, the NYT reported less than 30 per cent of the Spanish population attend Mass regularly.
Now the Spanish bishops have changed their tack, reports El Pais , and are calling for a new evangelization of Spain. Bishop Ramon del Hoyo Lopez, the bishop of Jaen and the president of the country’s Episcopal Commission for Missions told the Spanish press that the call for new evangelization comes “because there are people who are not baptized and who do not know the Gospels and others who are baptized but have distanced themselves.”
In response they have issued a pastoral instruction entitled “Actuality of the Mission ad gentes in Spain” which calls for more mission work both in Spain and abroad. Spain has 17,000 missionaries working around the world.
According to El Pais, Bishop Del Hoyo added that while there had been a growth in activity which showed solidarity with the disadvantaged, there had been a decline in “a generous response to the call of God to the mission” to evangelise. For this reason he wanted to make it completely clear that missionaries are not aid workers and stressed that even though they dedicated a large part of their time to look after the neediest, their primary mission is to transmit the Gospel and “the mystery of the God’s love to humanity”.
Pope John Paul II popularized Pope Paul VI’s notion of “new evangelization”, a term JPII used often. In the 1990 Encyclical Redemptoris Missio JPII called for a new evangelization: “I sense that the moment has come to commit all of the Church's energies to a new evangelisation and to the mission ad gentes. No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any parish possessed of a breathing congregation, must be in want of a website.
We've all seen them. The parish websites that look like they date back to 1996, with their basic coding and their dead links. Time and resources of course are a problem and all too many parish priests simply don't have a moment or the technology to get their e-ministry going.
Still some have managed admirably and I felt compelled to point to Fr Peter Newby's new slick beautifully designed parish website which has replaced his older clunkier one. Web 2.0 Here come the parishes. The Church has had a presence here for quite a long time thanks to Catholic bloggers, the intrepid Jesuit missionaries in Second Life and of course the Bishops' Conferences and the Vatican which have been getting themselves on-line.
Fr Newby, former Oxford University chaplain, now parish priest to St Mary Moorfield's in the City of London has a number of initiatives for the young as well as a good daily midday Mass. Check it out. There's rather a cool, limited access section where his "Young City Catholics" can access the photos from talks, Masses and events. Two thumbs up.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the Vatican’s first women—at the time I was hoping to use an interview with Madre Margarita Claveria, the only one of the four I was able to make contact with through her order-- but was unable to include it. It has arrived and I reproduce it here, in translation.
From the moment she was entered the novitiate on her sister’s wedding day in 1933 to the day she became one of the first women to work in a curial office in 1867, to today an apparently a spry and healthy 96-year-old, Madre Margarita’s life has spanned a great shift in attitudes and change in the life of the Church. In many ways she was there, where the change was happening, a milestone in her own feisty, humorous way. Her answers make interesting reading.
Madre Margarita Claveria replies:
Where were you born?
In Madrid on August 26, 1911, in the house of the older sister of my mother, after my maternal grandmother had already died.
When did you enter religious life?
On October 7, 1933 the year of my father’s death, he was already a widower. On this same day, my only sister was married and the “novios” (young bridal pair), just married, and accompanied me to the convent: they left the bride’s bouquet in front of the Virgin of the College and me in the novitiate. We lived in Barcelona, where I was educated in the College of Jesus-Maria of San Gervasio.
What sort of education did you receive?
That which there was in the Colleges of Jesus-Maria, where I studied until I finished the Bachillerato (A-Level equivalent).
What were the subjects or areas in which you were most expert?
In Maths and Classical languages: Latin and Greek. I was always reciting verses from the Anabasis of Xenophon and other authors…later, already a Religious, I did a Masters in History at Zaragoza.
What were the circumstances under which you were chosen to be one of the first four women to work in the Congregation of the Institutes of Religious life?
The Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation of Religious Life (Hildebrando Antoniutti) ask Pope Paul V I for there to be women also working in the dicasteries of the Holy See. The pope thought it was a good thing and in time we began as the first women, all religious from different Orders and of different nationalities.
I was in Rome, after several years of being a teacher of Latin, Greek and History in our Colleges in Zaragoza and Barcelona (San Gervasio) and I was soon appointed Superior and Director of the College and two years later, Provincial Superior, a position which I held for 14 years, after which I was sent to Rome, where the Mother General designated me to work for the Holy See.
What sort of feelings did you have when you heard the news of your appointment?
Not anything “special”, [I thought] only of the responsibility. We started but it soon became “normal” that other women worked and were employed in the Offices of the Vatican. Soon it was noticed that the women we were more active and conscientious workers than men. In the beginning our companions were a bit “disconcerted”…
What were the beginnings of your work?
Like that of all the priests and religious men who already worked there. A bit boring in the beginning but then we entered into the material.
Did you feel like you were opening new paths?
Yes. It felt a bit like we were the first. But soon it seemed completely normal to us, as much to those concerned as to others. The first four Religious, we started in October. In the end—as I already said—almost all the dicasteries had women Religious and female members of secular institutes in their personnel.
Did you find much resistance or difficulties on the part of the men who were in charge of your work?
No, to the contrary: support and confidence. They even paid attention to our feminine intuition, more subtle than that of the men, and consulted me frequently.
What were your duties and responsibilities?
Those of all the employees, what the men did—we women did also, I especially looked after the Conferences of the Major Superiors of the world, especially in Europe.
How much time did you spend working in Rome?
It seems to me that from 1967 to 1981 when I celebrated my 70th birthday and my jubilee.
What did you do afterwards?
I functioned mainly as the messenger of the Community in Rome Via Nomentana on everything about the General Council and also in the local Community. It was logical because I knew both the city and the language perfectly. I was also an advisor of the Sacred Congregation of Religious. In 1985 they sent me to Spain to be the Superior of the Community of the Infirmary in Valencia, remained the Superior there until they assigned me to the infirmary of Barcelona, San Gervasio.
Were there any conditions, being a woman and a religious, to hold a position in the Church?
As far as I know, no. I suppose they required us to have an adequate formation.
Do you have any favourite anecdotes from your time in Rome?
I’ve forgotten many of them…I remember a good relationship with the Cardinal Prefect Antoniutti and with the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation and especially with Father Basilio Heiser (a Conventual Franciscan) who this year celebrated his 100th birthday, His party was splendid. After my return to Spain I received various letters and postcards from him.
The employees of the Sacred Congregation, when preparing our offices, put large bouquets of flowers—made of plastic of course—because we were women. We were grateful from the bottom of our hearts for this detail.
Pope John Paul II wanted get to know the different dicasteries of the Sacred Congregation and when he came to the one for the Religious, I accompanied him. He wanted to come into the office because it seemed very big to him, he was interested in what we did and was straightforward, friendly and chatty which was always his disposition. For Christmas he sent each of us who worked there a book he had written inscribed with his wishes as well as the traditional Roman sweets for the Christmas season.
Every year, all the personnel of the Sacred Congregation had one excursion, of a cultural nature which would be one or two days long: Subacio, Siena, Sicily, etc…. The women, being more precise, became spontaneous cicerones, making the men pay attention to the wonders which we were looking at.
There are many more anecdotes which I do not remember in detail, except that that many matters of total “professional secrecy passed through my hands and they said that we women knew how to keep a secret as well as or better than the men.
************************************************************************** Many thanks to Madre María Ángeles García Gil, the Superior of the community who translated my questions into Spanish and asked them on my behalf.
**************************************************************************
Pope Benedict again condemned Holocaust denial when he met with representatives of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations earlier today.
Speaking to the Jewish delegation at the general audience the Pope spoke about the horrors committed during the Holocaust and condemned Holocaust denial, calling it intolerable and unacceptable to minimize the “terrible crime”.
He also spoke about his experiences during his visit to Auschwitz and about his planned visit to the Holy Land, which was jeopardized by a disintegration of Jewish-Catholic relationships after one of the four recently re-incommunicated Society of St Pius X bishops publically minimized the Holocaust on Swedish television. During the audience, the Holy Father called for there to be "lasting friendship" between Christians and Jews and said he hoped the Church's "irrevocable commitment to respectful and harmonious relations with the people of the Covenant will bear fruit in abundance."
Pope Benedict said:
The two-thousand-year history of the relationship between Judaism and the Church has passed through many different phases, some of them painful to recall. Now that we are able to meet in a spirit of reconciliation, we must not allow past difficulties to hold us back from extending to one another the hand of friendship. Indeed, what family is there that has not been troubled by tensions of one kind or another? The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate marked a milestone in the journey towards reconciliation, and clearly outlined the principles that have governed the Church’s approach to Christian-Jewish relations ever since.
The Church is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all anti-Semitism and to continue to build good and lasting relations between our two communities. If there is one particular image which encapsulates this commitment, it is the moment when my beloved predecessor Pope John Paul II stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for God’s forgiveness after all the injustice that the Jewish people have had to suffer. I now make his prayer my own: "God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant" (26 March 2000).
The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27). It is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable. Recently, in a public audience, I reaffirmed that the Shoah must be "a warning for all against forgetfulness, denial or reductionism, because violence committed against one single human being is violence against all" (January 28, 2009).
This terrible chapter in our history must never be forgotten. Remembrance — it is rightly said — is memoria futuri, a warning to us for the future, and a summons to strive for reconciliation. To remember is to do everything in our power to prevent any recurrence of such a catastrophe within the human family by building bridges of lasting friendship. It is my fervent prayer that the memory of this appalling crime will strengthen our determination to heal the wounds that for too long have sullied relations between Christians and Jews. It is my heartfelt desire that the friendship we now enjoy will grow ever stronger, so that the Church’s irrevocable commitment to respectful and harmonious relations with the people of the Covenant will bear fruit in abundance.
Caroline Petrie, the Baptist nurse suspended for offering to pray for an elderly patient, has emerged from this saga triumphant. She can go back to her job as a community nurse and she has had an apology of sorts from the North Somerset Primary Care Trust. Its statement admitted that the nurse, a devout Christian, was acting “in the best interests of her patients” and that prayer is recognized as an “integral part of health care and the healing process”.
From the way I understand the story, Mrs Petrie merely asked an elderly lady if she wanted Mrs Petrie to pray for her. The lady, apparently, showed no alarm, replied in the negative and never complained to the authorities. She mentioned the episode to another staff member and the whole thing exploded.
Much has been said about the way in which this case has highlighted the problems of “Religion and Belief: A Practical Guide for the NHS”.
The Health Service’s new document says that preaching or any attempt to convert people at work “can cause many problems as non-religious people and those from other religions or beliefs could feel harassed and intimidated by this behavior.” But Mrs Petrie’s behavior, if her version of events is to believed, does not even begin to approach proselytism, preaching or even conversion.
What struck me most, reading the story on the various news websites, was the vehement and often angry objection people had to Mrs Petrie’s offer of prayer. “How dare she impose her views on me??!?” as well as “She should keep her prayers to herself…pious drivel!!!!?” “How can she proselytize??” was the tenor of many posts in the comboxes.
I would be upset if someone kept urging me to convert, but honoured, touched and deeply moved if someone offered to pray for me, whether they shared my religious convictions or not. This is not only because I am a person with a deeply held belief in God and reckon that I need all the prayers I can get, but also because I would see such an offer as a sign of respect and a recognition of a shared humanity. For someone to reach out (and not in a religious sense) and say, come, I will appeal to what I hold sacred for your sake, is quite moving.
The flip side of Mrs Petrie’s story—and one which has been addressed by the Catholic Medical Association in a new statement by Dr Ian Jessiman, the CMA’s treasurer—is that she was responding to a need that she identified: the spiritual welfare of the patients.
Two of the points made in the CMA statement:
“--We are aware of many compelling cases in where the timely offer of spiritual care has made a huge difference to the sick, the dying and also to those who are left behind after death. We strongly support the view that careful and appropriate enquiry around spiritual issues ought to be a basic part of caring for the sick. Many patients strongly welcome such an approach being offered.
--In recent years we have become increasingly aware that the sick are not offered the chance to see their pastors unless they themselves specifically ask for this. This uis most difficult when you are confused or unconscious and we express our gravest concern that in such circumstances health staff no longer feel it is their duty to support patients in their spiritual needs”
This more-or-less chimes with what one of my friends who is a hospital chaplain has been saying. He finds it difficult to know which patients would require his care and access to the Sacraments because he is not informed of which patients are Catholic or not.
The CMA suggest the following:
“a) All those admitted to hospital ought to be asked if they have a religion and this ought to be recorded.
b) All those declaring a religion should be told that unless they ‘opt out’, their names will be available to accredited visiting pastors from their Church/Mosque/Temple of their faith.”
In the meantime, perhaps Catholics could start carrying cards like the ones organ donors get, which say, “I am a Roman Catholic and I require a priest and access to the Sacraments.”
According to the formidable and funny, cat-loving Mulier Fortis(Mac McLernon) the Sisters of the Gospel of Life up in Scotland have had a little explosion when their car blew up. Now they use this to deliver the things that are needed by the women and babies they help out, so it was nothing short of a small scale disaster.
They have since found a replacement, but have had to take out a loan. From the sounds of things, they could use a hand. Thanks, Mac for pointing it out!
Apparently the Dominicans are responsible for a new fracas in the Anglican Communion. Reason for the uproar—which has caused consternation with some members of the Church of England—is nothing more than invitation to sing Compline at Lambeth Palace.
The Observer’s Oliver Marre has the story. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, in a gesture of goodwill, invited members of the Order of Preachers to sing Compline to celebrate the launch of his Lent Book, written by an English Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe. And they, happy to be invited, accepted. It’s all friendly, above board and within the civil boundaries of ecumenism. There is certainly no threat of the ghost of Tomas “the Hammer of Heretics” Torquemada there, so wherein lies the problem?
Mr Marre reports that one complaint came from the Rev Dominic Stockford, an ex-Catholic priest who is now a member of the Protestant Truth Society: "It's a sad day when the Archbishop of Canterbury can decide to join in prayer with one of the orders that so viciously opposed the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic church still opposes the fundamental doctrines of the Church of England as expressed in its 39 Articles. The archbishop shows himself to be completely unsuited to the leadership of a Reformed Protestant denomination."
I wonder what the fellas over at Massinformation think about the Rev Stockford’s analysis of the situation—and his decision to place the CofE firmly with the post-Reformation churches rather than with the Churches of the first millennium.
It’s been amazing, at times disheartening, to watch the way the story about the lifted excommunications has been poorly reported, poorly explained and has escalate over the last two weeks. But more on this later.
In Germany in particular, the papers have been going crazy. From the small local newspaper for Regensburg to the biggies like the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the heavies like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the amount of text that has been generated in the last two weeks has been pretty overwhelming.
Today, the FAZ and the Sueddeutsche were both posting on the subject with a frequency that was unreal. But amid the word-avalanche, I found some solid ground. For the first time, after tracking through innumerate articles in the mainstream press—yesterday was a particularly depressing day—I came upon a complete anomaly in the FAZ: a report which did not talk about “rehabilitation”, which was informative and actually said what was happening. Sure, it was pretty dry and didn’t make the sort of entertaining reading that the Sueddeutsche’s article on Bishop Richard Williamson’s loathing for the Sound of Music or the extremely well reported one in today’s Mail gave us, but in its dryness it was paradoxically refreshing.
The meister-reporter was no one other than Heinz Joachim Fischer , who holds a doctorate in religious philosophy, a Licenciate in theology, was studying in Rome during Vatican II and has been the FAZ’s long-time Vatican correspondent. (The full article can be found in German here ) The measured tone and accurate reporting, even in my awkward translation is just a relief. The voice of sanity, or some of it, follows here:
"Papal competence acknowledged
The reason for the lifting of the excommunications was a letter of the leader of the Society, Fellay, who proclaimed--also in the name of the three others—the firm will to be Catholic and recognise the Roman Catholic Church with her teachings and the demands of the Pope. With that, they acknowledged the Papal competency over their consecration as bishops which Lefebvre had gone against.
The repeal of the excommunicataion does not change anything, as the note from the Vatican Secretariate of State last Wednesday re-emphasised, that the bishops and priests of the society still do not have ecclesiastical recognition. For them counts the “Suspension” “a divinis” the punishment for priests in which they are suspended from office and ministry, which they incurred as members of a brotherhood in an ecclesiastical community not recognised by the Pope”.
The Traditionalists distanced themselves from the Roman Church because they saw in the Second Vatican Council in the years 1962 to 1965, especially the decisions on religious freedom and the effective abolition of the old Tridentine, as deviating from the really Catholic.
Penitent sinners eager for improvement?
At first, the Society of St Pius X was founded by Archbishop Lefebvre 1969/70 with the tolerance of the Catholic Church. Then, with increasing alienation/distancing from Rome, [the Society] worked half-Canonically under suspension, as of 1988 under excommunication. The “suspension”—against which in the practice the society is broken against—still remains until “full reconciliation and full communion” has been re-established with the Pope and, as Wednesday’s statement demanded, Williamson has recanted.
The withdrawal of the excommunications with the continuing suspension means that the Traditionalists have no rights in the Catholic Church, but are allowed to be considered as penitent sinners willing to be improved. In their society they work in a canonical grey zone, with the obligation to bring their canonical status into order.
Political views not decisive
Political views cannot, according to Roman Catholic code, present either conditions or barriers fro membership in the Catholic Church. Bishop Williamson can hardly therefore be excommunicated by reason of his political or historical views. These can, however, be determining [factors] for admittance to Church offices and could lead to a suspension of the office if [they are] seen as a nuisance to the faithful, or in the case of bishops, as a sign of inadequate administration. Williamson was set the condition “to distance himself from his opinions about the Shoah in absolute unequivocal and public manner” for admission to Episcopal functions.
The “good behaviour”—measured by the Vatican’s yardsticks—will also be decisive for the further path to full Communion and for the revocation of the suspension. "
As I wrote, it's not fun or easily digestible reading, reduced to a sound bite, but then this whole matter is fairly complex.
In light of the recent events, Fr Joseph Komonchak over at America Magazine has an interesting take on the Hermeneutic of Reform and Continuity. Worth a read even if you disagree with him.
The turmoil, emotion and excitement of the last week have been palpable. The Pope’s decree which lifted the excommunications hanging over the “Econe Four” has been met with a multitude of mixed reactions and understandably so. The separation between the Church and the Society of St Pius X has been bitter, charged with political overtones, painful and long-lasting for both parties.
Lifting the excommunications is only a step towards the priestly fraternity’s reconciliation with the Church, but it is an important one. They are no longer excommunicated but they are still suspended from ministry. For one thing, the decree has primarily addressed a legal position, incurred by overt disobedience over the pre-emptive consecration of four bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988 against the pope’s express wishes. Pope John Paul II issued the Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei which lamented the action but clearly stated that the five men were excommunicated by it. (The legality of this has been called into question, but I am no canon lawyer, so will not explore that further.)
The present Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, served as a mediator between John Paul II and the Society. When he assumed the papacy, Benedict XVI met Bishop Bernard Fellay, leader of the “Econe Four” in 2005 and has been trying to foster a rapprochement with the breakaway group since. Liberating the Mass of John XXIII to which the society is attached, Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum was widely seen as a gesture of goodwill towards the SSPX and traditionalists in Communion with the Church. Last summer, however, it seemed as though talks were going nowhere. The Ecclesia Dei Commission—founded in 1988 to deal with breakaway traditionalist groups seeking reconciliation with Rome-- had presented the Lefebvrist bishops with a loose set of conditions and an ultimatum, which Bishop Fellay seemed to neither accept or decline. He called again for the excommunications to be lifted before dialogue for unity could move forward.
Last week was the week of prayer for Christian Unity and the 50th anniversary of John XXIII’s call to hold the Second Vatican Council. We surmise from the L'Osservatore Romano, that the issuing the announcement on the day that VII was called was intentional. The Vatican newspaper argued in an editorial on Monday that the gesture was one which “would have pleased John XXIII and his successors and a clear offer that Benedict, Pope of peace, wanted to publish with the anniversary of the announcement of Vatican II, with the clear intention to soon see a painful fracture healed”.
But the decision to lift the excommunications on a day of such significance has angered a number of Progressive Catholics who see it as a gesture of repudiation of the reforms and the much touted “spirit of Vatican II” brought about by the Council. Archbishop Lefebvre was among the most outspoken of the Council fathers critical of the Second Vatican Council and the SSPX was in part founded as a reaction to aspects of Vatican II.
But the timing proved unfortunate for another reason: The SSPX bishops seemed to be accountable only to themselves. Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the “Econe Four” with the most extreme political, historical and religious views—-he believes that the post-Conciliar Church is the “Church of Man” whereas he serves the “Church of God”—-gave an interview to Swedish television in which he effectively denied the Holocaust. This was aired the week during which the rumours about the decree were circulating.
The mainstream media homed in on Bishop Richard Williamson’s un-savoury anti-Semitic opinions and mad conspiracy theories about 9/11, coming at a time when Jewish Catholic relations have been strained and ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day. Ordinary Sunday-Mass-going Catholics were stunned to incomprehension by reports that the Holy Father was condoning Holocaust denial and reversing not only Pope John Paul II’s policies but the entire corpus of the Second Vatican Council.
The Jerusalem Post called for a three month cessation of relations between the “organized Jewish community” and the Vatican and Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee’s said that "while the Vatican's reconciliation with the SSPX is an internal matter of the Catholic Church, the embrace of an open Holocaust denier is shameful, a serious blow for Jewish-Vatican relations, and a slap in the face for the historic efforts of Pope John Paul II, who following his predecessors, made such remarkable efforts to eradicate and combat anti-Semitism.”
He said: "I am sure that the lifting of the excommunication was not an affirmation by the Church of Holocaust denial. However, the failure to take into consideration his outrageous opinions is deplorable. Williamson should not have been included in this embrace."
In the last 48 hours, the chief rabbinate of Israel severed its ties with the Vatican and it seemed as though Jewish-Catholic relations have deteriorated almost completely—although both rabbis in Israel and abroad have welcomed the Pope’s affirmations of solidarity with the Jewish community and his repudiation of negationism and reductivisim vis-à-vis the Shoah.
Interestingly, since the rumours about last Saturday’s decree began circulating and the Vatican and the SSPX have come under fire, Bishop Fellay and the head of the SSPX in Germany have distanced themselves completely from Bishop Williamson’s views, which they have previously been loath to do. They have apologized publicly to the Pope and Bishop Fellay has silenced his co-bishop on matters historical political. Bishop Williamson himself has been reported, by the Spanish blogger who broke the story , to have written a letter to the Pope apologizing for the damage his opinions have done to the Holy See. In short, since the excommunications have been lifted, the SSPX is being held accountable for what they say. No bad thing that.
The English Dominican students over at GodzDogz have started a new series of interview/profiles called Friars' Passions. In the first one, Br Mark Davoren describes life as a friar and an Arsenal fan. Worth checking out.
How could I have forgotten the wonderful Perpetual Adorers over at Tyburn Convent by Marble Arch in my last post about Adoration, Exposition and Holy Hour?
Thanks to a couple of kind emails from readers reminding me, I dropped in there to say hello on the way to meet a friend earlier this week. It’s a powerful place and a real oasis in that busy part of London. It’s open for Adoration from 6.15 to 8.30pm (NB I haven't been able to verify this, as I was unable to get through by telephone).
At Westminster Cathedral, the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on Fridays after the 1:05pm Mass until the 5:00pm Mass.
Exposition at St Pat’s in Soho Square is on weekdays 1.30 pm - 6.00 pm, Saturday 7.00 pm - 9.00 pm, but there is also a rota for Perpetual Adoration which one can sign up for.
Other readers have written in with other cities:
At the Birmingham Oratory there is Exposition after the 8am Mass on Saturdays with Benediction at 10:45am and there is Benediction on Tuesday evenings at 8pm.
Here are some more:
Holy Name Church, Oxford Road, Manchester
Monday to Friday 12-1pm, Saturday 7-8pm
St Mary's (The Hidden Gem), Mulbery Street, Manchester
Perpetual Adoration
Weekdays: 8am to 4pm
Saturdays: 10.30am to 5pm.
Schonstadt Shrine, Manchester Road, Kearsley, Bolton
Weekdays: 5-6pm, Saturday 11am to Noon, Sunday 2-3pm.
St John's Cathedral, Chapel Street, Salford
Wednesday and Friday 11am to Noon
Blessed Sacrament Shrine, Dawson Street, Liverpool
Monday to Saturday: 8am - 6pm Perpetual Adoration.
Many, many thanks to all the people who sent things in.
James Preece over at the Catholic and Loving it blog proposes rather an interesting and entertaining solution for the Catholic marriage crisis which we reported on last week. So did the broadsheets in typical manner.
The Daily Telegraph explained the 24 per cent decline in Catholic marriages from 2000 thus: "The rate of decline is twice as fast as the national rate, mainly because the Catholic church does not allow divorcees to re-marry in church".
Mr Preece suggests some radical re-thinking on dealing with the vocations crisis, which would involve some radical re-structuring in the dioceses in order to sensibly and realistic address the problems facing the Church and married couples. As they say in America, enjoy.
This is rather a cool video focusing on Eucharistic Adoration, courtesy of Spirit Juice Studios and many thanks to Br Thomas OP over at Always Distinguish(ed) who discovered it.
For some regular Holy Hours, Adoration or Exposition in central London:
St Mary Moorfields: Adoration takes place all week, Monday to Friday 8.30am-6.00pm
St Patrick's Soho Square: Perpetual Adoration from 7am-7pm
The London Oratory: Holy Hour and Benediction from 6:30 every Thursday
St Mary Cadogan: Adoration on Wednesdays from 12:30 to 6:30
Farm Street: Exposition Monday-Friday from 12:30 to 1:05
These are just a few. If you would like the times for Adoration for your church to be posted up, just send me an email.
Over at the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuits are ramping up for the International Year of Astronomy, marked by the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s discoveries. Read about the cosmos on Vatican astronomer Br Guy Consolmagno’s blog.
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Pope Benedict was very cosmic himself on the Feast of the Epiphany when he spoke about the Magi, wise men, possibly astronomers who were led to the Christ Child by the stars. He said that the birth of Christ had been a "cosmological revolution" where divine love incarnate was the universal law. He warned scientists not to ignore the "author creator" and to resist the temptation to deify the stars and the planets..
He said: “Christian thinking compares the cosmos to a ‘book’ as Galileo put it himself, considering it as the work of an author who expresses himself through the ‘symphony’ of creation.
"At a certain point in this symphony one finds what in music is called a ‘solo’, a subject assigned to a single instrument or voice. And it is so important that the meaning of the whole work depends upon it. This ‘solo’ is Jesus…The Son of man sums up in himself earth and sky, creation and Creator, flesh and Spirit. He is the centre of the cosmos and history because in Him Author and work are united without merging.”
For an entertaining account of the year of Astronomy, visit the Catholic News Service blog.
Widely hailed in the late 1990s as a sensible alternative to sex education which focused on contraception, abstinence-only education has come into the line of fire in the United States during these days of transition between the 43rd president and the 44th. For many of a certain political persuasion and geographical region, abstinence-education has become yet another aggravating aspect of the perceived systemic failure of the Bush administration and the power of the Religious Right.
The virginity pledge, pioneered by the “True Love Waits “programme in 1993 and brought again to public prominence with the “Silver Ring Thing”, has become perhaps the most recognized symbol for abstinence-only education. While Catholics have in some places adopted the notion of public virginity pledges, which tend to focus more on fidelity to Christ or teaching than they do on the concept of purity, but on the whole virginity pledges often sit uncomfortably with Catholics.
As the most public emblem of the movement which sets out to teach teenagers about sex, the virginity pledge is also one of the most criticized aspects of the movement. Unfortunately for the abstinence-only movement, it seems, the virginity pledge does not work very well—a New Yorker article contrasting the sexual mores of blue state and red states a few months back, cited a statistic which claimed that the virginity pledge only functioned when pledgers were in a minority which was under 30 per cent of a class or cohort.
A recent study in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal, which has been long been critical of abstinence-only education, also took on the virginity pledge.
The study’s conclusion: “Virginity pledges may not affect sexual behavior but may decrease the likelihood of taking precautions during sex. Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially virginity pledgers.”
Based on data aggregated over five years by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the study by Janet Elise Rosenbaum, a post-doc at John Hopkins University, found that virginity pledgers were just as likely as their counterparts to engage in sexual activity, in a five-year period, have the approximately the same amount of sexual partners and perhaps most shocking of all, 82 per cent denied that they had ever taken the pledge five years later. Pledgers contracted the same level of sexually transmitted diseases as non-pledgers over the same period of time, but were less likely (unsurprisingly) to use contraception.
The notion of sexual abstinence, especially when it comes in the form of virginity pledges, remains a source of bemused amazement for many of the more sexually liberated denizens of the so-called blue states as the New Yorker article demonstrated. It is an unrealistic expectation, they say, because teenagers will have pre-marital sex and so it is better that they are healthy and consequence free, than riddled with guilt and sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr Rosenbaum’s study does give credence to the claims that virginity pledges are not particularly effective and as virginity pledges are often used to evaluate a programme’s effectiveness, she argues that abstinence-only sex education is not effective in changing teen behaviour. She argues, “No abstinence only sexual education programmes have been identified as changing adolescent sexual behaviour in either the congressionally mandated randomized experiment or the systematic review of well designed AOSE studies…”
And yet the age of sexual initiation of her matched cohort of teenagers, of both those who took pledges and those who did not, was far higher at 21-years-of-age than the national age which is around 17-years-of-age. Dr Rosenbaum herself when arguing for the way she has organized her data says that one of the mistakes of the earlier studies of the effectiveness of virginity pledges was that they did not take into account the wide difference in education and worldview between the teens taking pledges and those who do not.
Let’s re-summarise the data: The evidence suggests that young will have sex, whether they promise they won’t or not. Those who swear pledges are less likely to use contraception than their peers with the same background. But what the study didn’t focus on was that the overall behaviour of the cohort showed that they had a later age of sexual initiation and fewer sexual partners than their peers across the United States.
It is a shame that the virginity pledges probably don’t work as well as has been claimed in the past—in some ways they place undue pressure on teenagers and it is important to remember man’s tendency towards sin—but what the study does show is that it is vital for parents and communities to continue to teach not just what the Church’s moral teaching is, but why it exists.
Dr Rosenbaum gave an interesting interview with Time Magazine.
In Germany on January 6, the parish priest and the altar servers go from house to house on the Feast of the Epiphany, blessing the homes and writing the letters C+B+M and the year over the lintel of the front door.
A psychiatric patient intended to bite Pope Benedict in the neck during a foiled attack at the Midnight Mass at St Peter’s over Christmas.
Erwin Niederberger, the press officer for the Swiss Guards, told the Swiss online magazine20 Minuten that the hooded figure tackled to the ground by the Pope’s security people (see below) on Christmas eve was a mentally disturbed Italian woman. Neither Benedict XVI nor the rest of the congregation seemed fazed by the incident.
Fr Federico Lombardi, who heads the Vatican’s press office told the Associated Press on December 25 that he thought that the attacker wanted to greet the Pope.
“The woman wanted to bite the Pope in the neck,” said Niederberger.
According to Niederberger the woman is a Italian residing in Switzerland where she is in psychiatric care. The Swiss news agency claims that the woman was motivated by the reports in which the Pope’s Christmas message had been interpreted as a direct attack on homosexuals and transsexuals.
She is now in police custody. It is unclear whether she will be returned to Switzerland.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s most recent study, has shown that Catholics are over-represented in the United States 111th Congress which convenes for the first time on the Epiphany.
The study—which shows that the US Congress is far more diverse than it was even 25 years ago—says Catholics make up 30.1 per cent of Congress whereas in real life they make up less than 25 per cent of the American population. However it also claims that the religious make up of Congress more or less reflects the religious make up of the nation. Protestants still form the majority, but there are two Muslims and two Buddhists and one Quaker. Even the atheists are represented by California’s very own Rep. Pete Stark (D) who has publicly declared that he “does not believe in a supreme being.”
Number of pilgrims to Vatican drops in 2008:
The number of pilgrims to St Peter’s dropped by over half a million visitors this year, reports La Stampa’sGiacomo Galeazzi and the Vatican is feeling the pinch because donations are down too.
There were 2.215.000 pilgrims and visitors to the Holy See in 2008, as compared with 2.830.100 in 2007 and 3.222.820 in 2006. Cardinal Joseph Cordes who heads the Pontifical Council Cor Unum has worried that the changed economic climate has been a contributing factor in the decline of donations to the Vatican.
Hundreds of thousands attended Pro-Family Mass in Madrid:
Hundreds of thousands attended an open air Mass for the Holy Family last Sunday in Madrid. Also present were over 300 priests, 22 bishops and 5 archbishops.
More pilgrims than visitors to the Olympics:
During Christmas, Pope Benedict emphasized that he was not a pop-star and the World Youth Day, which took place this summer in Sydney, was not a Catholic Woodstock. He came out in favour of the event, which had been criticized.
He said “The phenomenon of World Youth Day is becoming ever more an object of analysis, in which people are trying to understand this form, so to speak, of youth culture. Australia had never seen so many people from every continent as it did during World Youth Day, even on the occasion of the Olympics. Before, there was fear that such a massive turnout of youth would disrupt the public order, paralyze traffic, make daily life more difficult, provoke violence and lead to drug use. All that turned out to be unfounded.”
The World Youth Day events attracted 223,000 pilgrims and the congregation at the Papal Mass in Barangaroo is said to have numbered around half-a-million souls.
The Vatican has released a long awaited Instruction on contemporary bioethical questions, which covers a range of moral issues including stem cell research, cloning, and the creation of hybrid human-animal embryonic cells.
PA Photos
Dignitas Personae (the dignity of the person) follows the 1987 instruction Donum Vitae approved by John Paul II and prepared by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was then head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
In the last eleven years, bioethical questions seem to have become ever more complex and the need for answers more pressing. With the passing of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill this year, the development of hybrid human-animal embryos and the possibility of the creation of savior siblings has become sanctioned by law. Other developments in the field of biotechnology which were not yet covered by the earlier document have been cloning of embryonic cells, embryonic stem cell research and the storage of embryos for later scientific use.
Much of the document repeats what has already been outlined by Church teaching with which the faithful are already familiar but coming as an instruction from the CDF it carries an authority that makes it difficult to ignore. The first two sections of the document re-iterate and elaborate on much of what was written in the 1987. It repeats that every human life has an intrinsic untouchable value, regardless of its size—from zygote to grave—or qualities.
The arguments against in vitro fertilization presented in 1987 are also elaborated in Dignitas Personae; based upon the notion that marriage and the family “constitute the authentic context where human life finds its origins”. Deliberate destruction of embryos and the absence of the conjugal act, make IVF morally illicit, the document says. Freezing and storing created embryos is also morally inacceptable, as is, by the same reasoning the use of embryos for experimentation.
Dignitas Personae covers new ground when it tackles the moral grounds for gene therapy, stem cell research and cloning. Gene therapy on non-stem cells with a strictly therapeutic end can be in principle allowed, but gene therapy which would change a person’s fundamental genetic make-up and could be passed into the next generation.
The instruction welcomes adult stem cell research, which is morally acceptable but condemns embryonic stem cell research as attacking the core of human dignity.
Hybrid embryos—a huge topic in Britain over the last year—are “an offense against the dignity of human beings on account of the admixture of human and animal genetic elements capable of disrupting the specific identity of man”.
Other points:
Reproductive Cloning: "Human cloning is intrinsically illicit in that, by taking the ethical negativity of techniques of artificial fertilization to their extreme, it seeks to give rise to a new human being without a connection to the act of reciprocal self-giving between the spouses and, more radically, without any link to sexuality. This leads to manipulation and abuses gravely injuriousto human dignity"
Therapeutic Cloning: “From the ethical point of view, so-called therapeutic cloning is even more serious.To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping thesick, is completely incompatible with human dignity, because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed. It isgravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends”
When a depressed 19-year-old kills himself with a concoction of pills in front of an audience of around 1,500 eager internet users, the incident is a tragedy and those who have watched it are condemned as voyeurs. When a 59-year old academic suffering from motor neuron disease ends his life by shutting off his breathing aid and swallowing a lethal dose of barbiturates in a Swiss clinic in front of television cameras, the decision to air the footage is defended by the broadcaster as informing “public debate about even the most challenging subjects”.
With last night’s airing of Craig Ewert’s death in the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in 2006 we have, as a society, perceptibly pushed back another boundary, publicly laid siege to another aspect of life. The “right to die” movement is becoming ever stronger and more vocal. Only last week an elderly Briton travelled to Switzerland to end his life and the papers in this country have been full of stories about Daniel James, a 23-year-old paralysed rugby player whose family “helped him die”, also in Switzerland, in 2007.
Although public opinion, on the whole, appears to have been disturbed by the Sky Real Lives programme— even Gordon Brown spoke out against assisted suicide during Prime Minister’s Questions—there were plenty of people commenting in the comboxes of the newspapers praising Sky and Mr Ewert for their “courage”, “intelligence”, “quiet rationalism”. As the boundaries soften further, pushed on by journalists who have already adopted the chilling rhetoric of the “right to die” and have succumbed to the easy emotive stories of suffering “heros”, these voices will become the majority. In the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Luxembourg, they already have. They are not a great majority, but they are numerous enough to make euthanasia legal.
It is undeniable that we live in a time in which life is perpetuated far beyond anything imagined by our forebears and with it the suffering of death is prolonged. It is also undeniable that when one sits at the bedside of a loved one, colostomy bag on one side, oxygen and feeding tubes on the other, there is the temptation to ask, “Where is the dignity in this? Where the humanity?”
Watching somebody die under these conditions, often begging, praying, for the pain to end is hard. Surely it would be better to let them have a “happy death” where they can retain some of the person they were in health, some of the humanity and the dignity they had. Surely, they deserve to die in peace before they lose themselves?
Again, as with abortion, this question of “dignity” depends ultimately on how we define what it means to be human. The “right to die” movement is one of the extreme logical consequences of a society that has turned its back on Christ. Without the Incarnation and the Crucifixion there is no beauty or dignity in suffering. Without them, there is no idea of the Resurrection or Salvation. Without these, there is no notion of sin. Without an idea of sin, there is no notion of objective evil. Without a notion of objective evil, the only evil is subjective, which makes suffering the greatest evil. Without a notion of an objective Truth outside of human experience, there is also no reason for not taking one’s own life if one is suffering.
Mr Ewert said on camera: “I am tired of the disease but I am not tired of living. I still enjoy life enough that I would like to continue but the thing is that I really cannot. If I opt for life then that is choosing to be tortured rather than end this journey and start the next one. Let’s face it, when you’re completely paralysed and cannot talk, how do you let somebody know you are suffering? This could be a complete and utter hell.”
Time and time again over the course of history the notion of the noble suicide recurs. It was common enough in the Roman Empire and later it developed again in the neo-classicism of the German Romantics where there could be no more noble death than the Freitod of the Romantic hero. Perhaps it was fitting that Mr Ewert chose Beethoven’s Ode to Joy to die to.
Again and again Pope Benedict returns to the same themes, reaching out across the cacophonous babble of post-modern life to offer both understanding and certainty. Speaking to young Italian seminarians on Saturday the Holy Father asked with earnest sincerity, whether contemporary man still feels need for Christ and for his message of salvation.
This may seem like an obvious rhetorical question for a Pope to pose. There can surely be nothing more natural than for the leader of Christ’s Church on Earth to be asking not whether he is still on message but whether people still feel the need for this message. And certain cynics might argue that if there is no longer a demand then there no longer is a market therefore the product must be changed. But that of course, is exactly the sort of relativism that Benedict XVI has consistently spoken out against, one that denies the existence of an objective Truth.
Believing in God when your neighbor believes in God is easy. Believing in God when your neighbor laughs in your face for your faith or treats you as though you ought to be sectioned, is not quite so easy. Culturally we are so used to the notion that consensus is good—we see it in politics, in scientific method, in entertainment, in schools, in ethics—that anything that breaks with consensus, that may be uncomfortable, is eyed with suspicion. After all, the old adage about safety in numbers has its truth somewhere and it is tempting to ask, “If so many people do not believe in it, then how can it be true?”
For the Pope to ask whether man still feels the need for Christ shows that he is not afraid to ask the questions that haunt contemporary Western Catholics particularly Europeans. It shows also, that he understands the world around him far better than most; he understands what ails it and us who inhabit it.
The chasm between the Weltanschauung of Europe’s Christians and her post-Christians seems to widen daily as the issues that one could politely debate even up to five to 10 years ago have now become bitter reality and the paradigm has shifted away from a world viewed overwhelmingly through a Christian lens to one which is viewed through a muddied but essentially utilitarian one.
Speaking to the seminarians the Pope analysed the shift in cultural understanding, so well illustrated in his encyclical Spe Salvi, in which mankind has forgotten the notion of salvation beyond man.
He said: “In the current social context, a certain culture seems to show us a face of a self-sufficient humanity, desirous of realizing its own projects through itself, which chooses to be the creator of its own destiny, which consequently believes that the presence of God does not count and so excludes it from its choices and decisions.
“In a climate marked by closed circuit rationalism which considers the practical sciences as the only model of knowing while the rest is subjective, non-essential or determining for life. For these and other reasons, it is without a doubt, more difficult to believe more difficult to accept the truth that is Christ, more difficult to spend one’s life for the cause of the Gospel.
“However, as we see in the daily news, contemporary man often seems disoriented and preoccupied with the future in the search for certainty and desirous of common points of reference. As in all ages, man of the third millennium needs God and seeks him perhaps without realizing it.
“The duty of Christians, especially of priests, is to respond to this profound yearning of the human heart and to offer all, with the means and ways that best respond to the demands of the times, the immutable and always living Word of eternal life which is Jesus.”
Part of the dilemma, the difficulty that the “dictatorship of relativism” leaves us in is an inability to believe in any one thing. Everything is acceptable, anything goes, as long as it suits you. It’s not that important. So many many people are struggling to find meaning in their lives, overfilled with information, so unsure of what is true, that they turn to empty ideologies and empty promises of hope. Pope Benedict knows that the Church can offer hope, beauty, Truth and unity in a world that often seems pointless, ugly and irrelevant.
As Benedict XVI told the 500,000 young people gathered at Randwick Racecourse for World Youth Day: “The world needs this renewal! In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair. How many of our contemporaries have built broken and empty cisterns in a desperate search for meaning – the ultimate meaning that only love can give? This is the great and liberating gift which the Gospel brings: it reveals our dignity as men and women created in the image and likeness of God. It reveals humanity’s sublime calling, which is to find fulfilment in love. It discloses the truth about man and the truth about life.”
Br Thomas Schaefgen OP at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St Louis, Missouri has done a good thing. He is recording himself reading out the documents of Vatican II and posting them on his blog as pod-casts.
The first one, Dei Verbum is just under half-an-hour long and perfect for those pesky Tube journeys in rush-hour. It makes an ideal companion for those moments when you’re faced with the ironing or driving or you know, just for fun.
As I’m already mentally with the Order of Friars Preachers, it is worth noting that the English province has just updated its website. It’s looking nice.
Deathbed conversions are controversial for a million reasons, theological, emotional and cultural. In Protestant countries, they have long been viewed with suspicion. There is the sort of mental image of the wicked Papist taking advantage of a man’s moment of weakness and forcing the Faith onto him as he lies dying. This sort of skepticism to the deathbed conversion has been transferred into the 21 Century popular consciousness. For Marxist philosophers, for whom religion and religious structures were a source not of freedom but of popular suppression, conversion stories are deeply suspicious. Popular piety and devotions to saints are seen only as another visible manifestation of the populace’s blindness to its spiritual shackles.
Little surprise then, that yesterday’s announcement of Antonio Gramsci’s deathbed conversion has been vehemently denied by Italian Communists.
Reporting in the Socialist Italian newspaper Il Riformista, Paolo Rodari says that the story about Mr Gramsci’s conversion told to journalists by Mgr Luigi De Magistris has been refuted by two prominent Communists. Based on the witness by two religious who worked in the hospital where Mr Gramsci spent the last two years of his life, the story which came out yesterday revealed that Mr Gramsci had not only kissed a statue of the Christ Child on Christmas but had also received the Last Sacraments and died reconciled with the Church of his childhood.
Apparently the Sisters’ story is an old one and there has been criticism of it floating about for some time. Fabiano Giovannini, director of the Communist magazine La Rinascita della Sinistra (The Rebirth of the Left) , has quoted a letter from Gramsci’s sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht to Piero Sraffa ,written a few weeks after his death. Miss Schucht, who had been at Mr Gramsci’s bedside while he was dying, described a very different deathbed scene.
She wrote that Mr Gramsci had suffered from a brain hemorrhage on April 25, 1937. He called for help. It came but his left side was left paralysed. He then fought death for two days. During this time Mr Gramsci complained to Miss Schucht that the “priests and sisters left him alone”. Proof enough for Mr Giovannini that the philosopher did not return to the fold.
Another criticism of the deathbed conversion theory came from Beppe Vacca, a philosopher and former Member of Parliament for the Communists. For him it is significant that the conversion story did not only not appear in Miss Schucht’s letter but was also omitted in a letter from Antonio Gramsci’s brother Carlo to Togliatti. The letter from Carlo Gramsci is also important, according to Mr Vacca because it focused on Antonio’s thoughts on cremation.
We are left to speculate whether Mr Gramsci found God, whether he kissed the feet of a statue of the Christ Child and whether he kept a picture of St Theresa of Infant Jesus at his bedside. There is as far as we can tell, not having access to his papers or the time, no visible written proof of his having received the last rites. He was buried in a Protestant cemetery in Rome.
The story did seem almost too good to be unquestionably true, but at least we can pray for him.
Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary Marxist and founder of the Italian Communist Party, died a Catholic. Reading this bit of news in the Italian paper La Stampa today was like reading that Bertrand Russell, the logician and author of Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays?, had become a Christian on his death bed. I had to read it again.
Gramsci was a prominent Marxist who lived in the late 19th century and died in 1937. Considered by many as one of the most important Marxist thinkers in history, his critique of Marxist materialism did not allow for an objective reality that exists outside human perception which he felt equal to an erroneous belief in God.
His work on hegemonic structures was mainly an attack on the Catholic culture of his homeland. He believed for Marxism to take a firm hold in the minds and hearts of the people it had to offer them a spiritual experiential element which could take religions place.
Luigi des Magistris, the pro-Major Penitentiary emeritus, born 1926, said told a press conference that Gramsci received the last rites and returned to the faith of his childhood on his death bed.
Monsignor Magistris spoke of his “contemporary” at the launch of a new book about the saints, saying that Gramsci had always kept a little picture of St Teresa of the Infant Jesus in his room.
“When Gramsci was in his last illness,” the cardinal said, telling a story that had moved him greatly, “the sisters at the hospital was doing the rounds with the picture of the infant Jesus for the patients to kiss. They passed by Gramsci. “Why did you not bring it to me?” he asked. They brought it to him and he kissed. Gramsci died with the sacraments and returned to the faith of his childhood.”
Christ the King aka Youth Sunday is upon us. For some of us this may mean being subjected to Reclaim the Future on Sunday. We’ll say sorry for the energy we’ve wasted and think about the Fairtrade chocolate we’ve tasted straight after Communion, whereas others will be remembering Pius XI’s crusade against secularism and proclaim Christ King.
Over at Catholic and Loving it! James Preece offers an interesting analysis of youth ministry and the purposes it should serve with some good graphs illustrating his points. He argues that formation should be an ongoing process, not just for the young but also the older, but that we should equip the young with the knowledge and formation to become young Catholic adults in an increasingly hostile world.
Mr Preece, a young father, speaks from the heart as a member of a generation which came to adulthood before the new Catechism was published but long after some of the more misguided reforms unleashed by the Council ensured that formation was something you got shortly before First Communion and Confirmation.
We heard the parable of the talents on Sunday and today again, we heard a similar story with pounds or golden coins from Luke. One priest from St Joseph's Church, Havant, Hampshire, has taken the parable to heart quite literally and has launched an initiative in his parish to help the Cafod Congo campaign. Inspired by the Gospel, Fr Tom Gufferty distributed £320 to his parishioners last Sunday.
Ten parishioners were given £5 another 10 were given £2 and a last group of ten was given £1.
“It was very well received by the parishioners,” says Fr Gufferty, “At first the people who were given £5 were a bit shy but by the time I was handing out £1 all hands were up in the air volunteering.”
The parishioners are being entreated to take the example of the parable and find ways of raising money for Cafod’s appeal for the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is aiming to raise £1 million to help the beleaguered country. Whether it is setting up a stall at the St Joseph’s Christmas Bazaar or a coffee morning, Fr Gufferty has suggested all sorts of ways in which to increase the talents. On the fourth Sunday of Advent parishioners will be invited to submit their returns and a cheque will be sent
From the looks of it, things are going well already. One parishioner raised £33 during a coffee morning.
So we’ve all heard of the “Lipstick Index”: good economy, slump in lipstick sales—bad economy lipstick sales are up. Small luxuries take the place of bigger ones. We are told sale of lipstick and cosmetics has an inverse correlation with the strength of an economy. And as the economic horizon looks ever darker, we hear a lot more about what the New York Times has called “that frivolous financial barometer that says cosmetics sales rise in direct relation to free-falling finances”.
As the country moves into a recession, the pews in churches seem to be a bit fuller, anecdotal evidence would suggest. Since the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007, the congregation at the weekday Masses at the City of London church I sometimes attend has increased.
The Catholic version of the Lipstick Index is far less frivolous though no less interesting. The parish priest made a canny observation. He said that people had become less generous with collection money as they started feeling the pinch, but that he had a booming trade in votive candles. “People put less into the collection, but I’ve noticed that they are lighting a lot more candles.”
I'm calling the phenomenon the “Candle Indicator” and is “that serious financial barometer which shows rising levels of trust in God as human endeavour shows its weakness”.
I’m guessing Saint Antony, Rita and Jude are working through a lot of intercessions at the moment.
Tell a cradle Catholic that it’s All Saints or the Feast of the Ascension or Epiphany and something buried deep inside forgotten recesses will click. The lapsed and the lazy will go to church for things out of the ordinary, even as they ignore their weekly Sunday obligation. Think Christmas and Easter.
Observe, next Ash Wednesday, how the churches fill, how there are more people wandering down your local streets with the dark shadow of a cross on their foreheads than you have ever seen in the pews on a Sunday. Stop and ask one of them if they know that Ash Wednesday is not a holyday of obligation and more likely than not they will stare at you blankly.
“Not a holyday of obligation? Then why did I go?”
Let’s face it, Catholicism is a religion that has a strong cultural dimension which often remains long after a childhood faith has been lost. It is easy to sneer at simple devotions and old fashioned pieties, to call those who fulfill their regular obligations hypocrites if they go to Mass, but no longer believe. But more often than not, the habit of Catholic culture becomes a way back into the Faith later in life.
A wise confessor once told me, after a prolonged absence from church during a period of serious doubt, “Just keep coming any way, even if you don’t believe. Being in His Presence week after week will help.”
All this is just a round-about way of trotting out the old plea which resurfaces each time a transferred feast jars the deep rhythms of cultural Catholicism.
“Please, can we have holydays of obligation back? It’s not fun having them on a Sunday.”
of intercessions at the moment.
James and Ella Preece’s blog Catholic and Loving it first broke the story about Reclaim the Future —the futuristic environmental joke liturgy planned for Youth Sunday. The specially designed liturgy also encourages young people to sign pledges to protect the environment and “livesimply” to mark Populorum Progressio an encyclical that had its anniversary three years ago.
In protest against the marked silence about the 40th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, James Preece has made a pledge on LiveSimply to LiveChastely for a year and is trying to get 1,000 people to join in.
He writes: “As part of LiveSimply, young people have been invited to make a promise to
change their lives in response the Populorum Progressio and the challenge to
live simply. At the LiveSimply Promises website, hundreds of young people
have made promises to turn off the light, eat fairtrade chocolate and not
drop litter etc.
“Now, over a hundred people believe that the time has come to make a new
promise. On the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae we are making a promise to
LiveChastely.”
If you haven’t already, go and sign the pledge ….and remember chastity and celibacy are two very different things…
Sex education is on the mind as the Government puts forward proposals for statutory sex education in both primary and secondary schools. The Catholic Education Service has welcomed much of the proposal.
Oona Stannard, the CES’s chief executive said, “Inevitably we live in a society where we have dreadfully high teenage pregnancy rates. We have very high rates of sexually transmitted infections. What I want to see—to take that as but one example—is teaching that will help reduce that. Nobody wants to see abortions. Whatever perspective you come from you have to agree with that and we certainly strongly oppose abortions.
“And as I have said repeatedly, we uphold the Church’s teachings. We also promote strongly the Church’s teaching about sexual relationships being reserved for marriage. It will therefore always be the case that we will be challenged by the fact that that ideal of within marriage is not something that is the norm for everyone. So if I’m challenged by anything, it is not the review and the review group but what’s happening in society as a whole and I hope and believe that this review will help us all, whatever persuasion, into making significant inroads into reducing some of the harmful behaviours, the risky behaviors out there.”
As the debate about how and whether sex education should be taught begins to unfold here, an article in the New Yorker magazine explores the great sexual divide over on the other side of the Atlantic.
Talk of the “two Americas” is inevitable as the US election campaign nears its end. Despite Mr McCain’s drop in the polls and the Republican party’s recent woes it is hard to ignore the indivisible nation’s fraught debate about abortion. From Sarah Palin’s decision to keep her little son Trig who has Downs Syndrome to her daughter Bristol’s decision not to “terminate” her early pregnancy we hear of the Republicans’ commitment to life. From Mr Obama’s stentorian tones at the Planned Parenthood rally to Nancy Pelosi’s hysterical gaffes about the Church’s position on the beginnings of life we hear of the Democrats’ commitment to choice. It is a serious issue for both those with religious convictions and those with a zealous belief in a “woman’s right to choose” alike. Whether you believe in the sanctity of human life or not, you are bound to have an opinion on Row v. Wade.
Interesting then, the article which appeared in this week’s New Yorker and which presents an image of a nation divided by sexual mores. Why, asks Margaret Talbot, the article’s author, are there more teen pregnancies in Red states than Blue states?
She recalls first the Democrat’s glee at the news of Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy and their shock when they saw that Evangelical Christians on the Right praised Miss Palin for not having an abortion.
Ms Talbot looks at some statistics which show that Red States have higher teenage birth rates than Blue states, start having sex earlier, that levels of so-called religiosity have very little direct correlation to teen-agers’ ability to stay chaste and that abstinence education only works to a certain degree.
The average age at which an evangelical teenager loses her virginity is sixteen. Abstinence pledges work in environments where those taking the pledges are in a minority. When the number of teenagers taking the pledge at a school goes over 31 per cent, the pledge system no longer works.
People marry younger in Red states, she tells us, and young marriages are more likely to fall apart. People who marry at more mature phases of their lives are more likely to stay together. Blue states, which have a freer, more utilitarian attitude to sex and all that that entails in the modern world, unsurprisingly have fewer teen pregnancies. Apparently, a new development shows middle class kids in Blue states staying celibate for longer and being far less sexually active than the kids in Red states who may have pledged abstinence.
In short, she argues, the values of the Blue states are far more moral than the morality of the God-inspired Red states.
Being pro-Life does not by default make you a good person, that much is clear..
The article is worth a read even if it may grate. Much of what it says rings true, even when one discounts the New Yorker’s political leanings and the author’s tone. One must bear in mind that the piece is predominantly about evangelical Protestants, but one must also ask oneself why the piece comes to these conclusions about abstinence education and sexual mores..
Perhaps part of the answer is that the Blue state paradigm is that man should be free to be sexually active without recrimination whereas the Red state paradigm is that man ought to be chaste but must suffer the consequences of his freedom to choose. We are presented with freedom from conscience versus freedom of conscience and it is easy to see why the former can seem so attractive.
Informing consciences with strong catechesis and Theology of the Body in schools anyone?
******* One aside: it was interesting to read that the people who attended religious services regularly were more likely to uphold Christian moral teaching than those who professed to be Christian but did not practice. Proof maybe, of what our friend Fr Z might call, “Lex orandi, lex credendi.”
The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen riffs on Catechesis and faith in this episode. If I remember rightly, there is also a very funny section in which he tells an absolutely hilarious story about a rochet...
Reading my daily dose of Zenit—“the World Seen from Rome”—this morning I couldn’t help noticing that a joke seen from Rome is probably thought extremely unfunny by the rest of the world. Consider this report for instance:
“President Delegate Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, addressed the Holy Father on behalf of the assembly, offering a brief, spontaneous and humorous reflection in Italian.
“The Australian cardinal brought a chuckle suggesting that this synod was one of those during which "most agreement and most communion" was lived, and therefore that "it has been perhaps the least interesting."
“When the Holy Father rose to greet the group, he made reference to the joke, saying that he didn't know if the synod had been the most interesting, but, yes, the most moving. This, he said, is because in listening to one another speak of the Word of God, we better hear the Lord.
“Thus, the Pontiff affirmed, the participants have learned to hear the Word of God better, discovering in it new possibilities. Meditation and reflection, he stated, can never exhaust all the treasures it contains.
“Benedict XVI also brought chuckles from the group. Referring to the large amount of work done by the relator-general, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, archbishop of Quebec, and the special secretary, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa, Congo, the Holy Father said with a smile that he felt uneasy at the violation of the human right to rest on Sunday and sleep at night.”
Side-splitting stuff, really. Unless it’s the American comedian Stephen Colbert’s truly irreverent stuff , Catholic humour isn’t quite as funny as lawyer jokes.
Or maybe it only appeals to a certain sort of Catho-geek (the sort that find the jokes about Franciscans, Jesuits and light-bulbs funny, which sadly, I do) and then this old thing I was sent, might amuse you:
You know you are a Catho-geek when:
F is the biggest section in your phone book: Fr X, Fr Y, Fr Z....
You think men not wearing a dog-collar look underdressed..
You don't think it's odd that almost half of all your male friends spend at least some of their time in skirts...
You've inadvertently said, "Father" when you mean "Mister".... You've genuflected leaving the cinema...
You think the Office is something you do morning, noon and night, not somewhere you go....
You've spent time wondering whether you ought to wear a mantilla for the extraordinary form..
You know that extraordinary form doesn't mean that you are super fit, but that the priest and deacons will have to be....
You know the difference between a chasuble and a cope....
You don't think asperges is french for asparagus tips...
You can talk more intelligently about Mother Teresa's Cause than you can about the situation in Iraq...
You've preemptively ended a date with the words, "I'd better tell you now that I'm a practicing Catholic."
You actually know the difference between the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception....
You would travel across half the globe facing dubious accommodation, bad food and little hope of washing in order to hear a certain senior citizen speak...
You think the word JPII should be followed with "We love you"...
You own at least one picture of BXVI...
You think he's so so cute...especially when he does that little wave...
There are more pictures of saints on your bedside table than there are of your family...
You've regularly had cross purpose conversations about Madonna....
You've found yourself spending perfectly good clubbing nights on your knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament...
You kinda wish you owned some relics...
You know the difference between chastity and celibacy...
You have at some point, at least once, seriously considered religious life...
Some one sent this to you and obviously thought you would find it funny...
There was a joke in the book by Fr Aidan Nichols OP that I am reading at the moment. I was so excited I had to tell everyone, but I can't find it now so this will have to do:
Q. What's black, then white, then black? A. A Dominican rolling down stairs.
Like Hazel Motes of Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, Ariane Sherine and Britain's "hard-nosed" atheists have shown that they are haunted by God. Motes, a po-faced young man from the South, who looks like a preacher but desperately wants to escape the Jesus Christ of Southern Protestantism, preaches the Church of Christ without Christ.
The Church of Christ without Christ
Ms Sherine and the British Humanist Society's latest lark, an atheist poster campaign on the sides of buses, preaches the Church-of-there-probably-is-no-God-so-have-a-nice-day. So desperate are they to free themselves from a God they don't believe in, that they preach his absence to anyone who will or will not listen with an earnestness that rivals that of the most fervent evangelical preacher. Like Motes, they are looking for freedom from God, little understanding the freedom that God gives. Shurely Ms Sherine and her gang are being counter-productive: apathy and indifference are far stronger tools against Faith than open antagonism.
Fr Ray Blake offers a refreshingly sane and humorous analysis on the situation.
Some good news came from Down Under today in an email from Fr Chris Ryan of the Missionaries of God's Love. A consecrated group of Charismatic Australian priests, brothers and sisters, the Missionaries of God's Love have outgrown their seminary in Melbourne and are asking for help to accommodate their growing numbers.
The Missionaries of God's Love were founded by Fr Ken Barker in 1986 in part as an answer to Pope John Paul II's call for new evangelisation. They have responsibility for a number of parishes in the Melbourne area and work with the urban poor, the marginalised and the young.
Fr Chris Ryan travelled with the World Youth Day cross and icon and the Missionaries of God's Love were in charge of the veneration site during the World Youth Day events. They are nice guys by the looks of it and are by all accounts. Check out their website. They depend entirely on donations so if you can help, here are their details.
For those of you who are still seriously old school and prefer snailmail, donations can also be mailed to: Fr Ken Barker
Missionaries of God's Love
6 Boake Place, Garran
ACT, Australia, 2605.
Something positive has emerged from the newest revolting antics of the Youth Services office. On the web, in emails, on Facebook, young Catholics have been discussing the Mass. Suddenly, the Justice and Peace posse are talking to the Theology of the Body gang, the mantilla-ed Trads are talking to the be-sandaled Charismos. It seems, everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and the words do not begin with "Brilliant God..."
For the Youth Services are offering a "Reclaim the Future!" Mass package for National Youth Sunday with the Bishops' Conference's blessing in which reclaiming the future has nothing to do with evangelization and a lot to do with recycling. It suggests young people repent over filling their kettles during the Penitential Rite as the "Liturgy" section stumbles through an awkward "Gospel Sketch" among other things.
This has unified a host of young Catholics who normally don't agree on very much.
Take for example the idea for the post-Communion reflection:
"Prepare some FairTrade chocolates or sweets to give out to the congregation - it can be a simple as a little piece from a block of chocolate, don't worry about spending too much! Wrap the individual chocolate or sweet in some tissue or greaseproof paper, adding a little livesimply message or action as a tag - things like 'change to energy saving lightbulbs' or 'try to walk somewhere this week instead of using your car' or 'give some change to charity' - and so on."
Down the phone, Martina, 25, makes gagging noises and wails: "They call that a liturgy? It's the chocolate that gets me. What is that about? Can't we just pray after Communion?"
"This has got to be a joke," reads an email from 24-year-old Charlotte, who is a member of a charismatic group, "I've never seen anything as stupid as this liturgy. It makes a mockery of God and mockery of the Mass."
Another email comes from Thomas, 22, who attends a normal Sunday Mass once a week at his university chaplaincy: "I just can't believe how tasteless, insipid and vile that Mass is. Saving the planet is important, the Pope talked about it at World Youth Day, but through Christ and the Church, not vice versa. I mean, we've been taught to recycle and care for the environment since our school days."
You do not have to be a fan of the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite or subscribe to the older form of the Ambrosian Rite (or even know what either of those things mean) to think this a profanation.
What this episode has shown is that the Mass is important for the young who are active and serious about their faith. It doesn't matter if this involves guitars and zithers or the Palestrina-the consecration, the Communion with Christ-is what is important: everything else follows through and out of the Mass. It is at the heart of our Faith as Catholics, it is what makes our Church the "one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" and not something that somebody just cobbled together.
At World Youth Day, Pope Benedict placed his finger on the pulse and showed that he understood what it is the young need: "... Be watchful! Listen! Through the dissonance and division of our world, can you hear the concordant voice of humanity? From the forlorn child in a Darfur camp, or a troubled teenager, or an anxious parent in any suburb, or perhaps even now from the depth of your own heart, there emerges the same human cry for recognition, for belonging, for unity. Who satisfies that essential human yearning to be one, to be immersed in communion, to be built up, to be led to truth? The Holy Spirit! This is the Spirit's role: to bring Christ's work to fulfilment."
Anyone over 16 who decides to continue fulfilling the Sunday obligation after leaving home has made a conscious decision to do so. There are no social pressures getting bottoms on pews anymore; the situation is quite the opposite. A Mass like the one proposed for National Youth Sunday merely patronises and trivialises that decision. To add insult to injury, National Youth Sunday is on the feast of Christ the King.
Adam, also in his early 20s, points out that Pius XI, who instated the feast of Christ the King would be rolling in his grave.
After all it was Pius XI who wrote in 1937: "Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds."
Fancy that! A blogging Pope. The Catholic news agency Zenit, reported that one of the auditors at the Synod of Bishops suggested Pope Benedict XVI start blogging in order to reach out to the faithful.
Seeing as the young faithful have been able to get text "messages" from BXVI since his visit to Austria and members of the Catholic networking site XT3 received a private message from the Pontiff during World Youth Day 08, the suggestion is not that absurd.
Perhaps in a few years we'll be lining up to watch our Popecasts online.
It will come as no surprise to the readers who have been watching the pre-election political debate unfold over in the United States that practicing Catholics and non-practicing Catholics have strongly divergent opinions. Those who practiced their Faith on a regular basis were more likely to agree with Church teaching than those who did not.
"Tell us something new!" you might gasp.
And yet, this must have come as news to some pollsters when a Marist College study commissioned by the Knights of Columbus was released yesterday.
Pollsters like to lump them together, the Catholic voters, because, heck it makes a better story if you can say 37 per cent of Catholics favour abortion until the third month than 28 per cent of practicing Catholics who favour it. Not only that, but there is a certain wariness about not calling a lapsed Catholic a non-practicing Catholic in these relativistic times.
Spot the National Catholic Reporter's universally fair John Allen distancing from the unpopular distinction of "practicing" and "non-practicing" by using quotation marks around them.
Mr Allen writes: "The Marist College poll found that 65 per cent of American Catholics are "practicing," defined as attending Mass at least once or twice a month, while the 35 per cent who don't attend that often were defined as "non-practicing.""
The looseness of the definition of "practicing" was a bit surprising since the last time I checked my Catechism on the Sunday obligation it read: "The Church obliges the faithful to take part in the Divine Liturgy on Sundays and feast days and prepared by the sacrament of Recconciliation to receive the Eucharist at least once a year, if possible during the Easter season.
"But the Church strongly encourages the faithful to receive the holy Eucharist on Sundays and Feast days or more often still, even daily."
But perhaps it points yet again to the sad truth that the last poll about American Catholics made clear, not even the stronger bastions of Catholicism are safe from the erosion with which a secular, relativising and fast moving world eats away at it. On a positive note, there is a sense that weekly Mass attendance-even if it is dwindling-is at the heart of following Church teaching. If we can diagnose the problem, perhaps we can do something about it.
Though maybe not quite like this, as inventive and well-meaning as it may be.
Still it is difficult in times like these not to feel like one is sinning against charity for making a distinction between practicing and non-practicing Catholic and mumble something about the "spirit and the letter of the Law". If we are unkind or uncharitable to those who have lost their faith or who have fallen away-which we inevitably are-then how will they ever know about Christ's great gift and about a faith which is not proscriptive but an affirmation and an act of love?
We must remind ourselves and the rest of the word that the Church is not a Church for saints but for sinners. It exists to bring Salvation and Redemption to a fallen world.
This is an old chestnut which dates back to 2005 and made the rounds just after BXVI's elections. Legend has it some young Frenchie was bored at work and decided to express his joy at the election of the new Pope.
It may offend a number of aesthetic sensibilities, but I am rather fond of it. I think it expresses the euphoria mixed with sadness with which we greeted Pope Benedict's election. After all, many of us had only ever known John Paul II.
Apparently young American Catholics are more progressive than older ones or so a report in the National Catholic Reporter would like to have us believe. This morning's headline of Young Catholics more progressive than older ones, poll finds gave me more of a jolt than the extra-strong matutinal coffee that gets me awake every day.
It raised a number of questions: What do they mean by progressive? Surely that term went out the window when the liturgy wars had reached their point of attrition in the 1980s. Haven't we been hearing about young Catholics being more "traditionally minded" or at least more "conservative"-I use those terms carefully; nothing is more irritating than rough political categories applied to religion-in recent years? How come we are suddenly hearing that young Catholics are more progressive?
To be a young progressive Catholic, you have to show an inclination to vote for Obama over McCain, think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, supportive of same sex marriage and want more government involvement in helping thhe poor, protecting the environment and regulating business. And this seems to be the trend. The National Catholic Reporter article is based on a study conducted by Public Religion Research and released by Faith in Public Life, a group which seeks to broaden the debate on religious and social issues. The Young and the Faithful shows that there is a generational shift in the political opinions of Catholics between the ages of 18-34 and those who are older, but that Catholics on the whole were more divided on issues such as abortion and less likely to be single issue voters than their evangelical peers.
Well over half the younger Catholics would vote for Obama over McCain, whereas their older co-religionists are almost evenly split between the parties. Forty-two per cent of the older Catholics polled considered themselves conservative whereas only 28 per cent of the younger Catholics think of themselves as conservative. Younger Catholics are also less likely to think that abortion and same-sex marriage were important voting issues. According to the poll, 61 per cent of young American Catholics also believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The survey was carried out on 2,000 adults nationally and had an "oversample" of 974 youngsters between the ages of 18-34 .
It's pretty sad to see these stats, not just because so many younger Catholics hold beliefs that Church teaching is explicitly against, but also because there is something even more grave going on here. There is a distinct drop in church attendance between the younger Catholics and the older Catholics.
Of the younger Catholic registered voter sample, 66 per cent belonged to the categories that attended Mass "once or twice" a month, a few times a year or seldom/never; while only 28 per cent of the young Catholics polled fulfilled their weekly Mass obligation and six per cent went to Mass more often than once a week.
Compare that with the national trend, 36 per cent of American Catholics fulfil their Sunday obligation. The European blight, growing secularisation and sinking Mass attendance, is happening over in the United States too, but we're just a bit further ahead than they are.
As my old university chaplain used to point out, "most young Catholics today who continue going to Mass have already opted-in to Catholicism. Thirty years ago, it was a question of people opting-out of Catholicism. This has changed. Now the young who are in church have decided to make an active commitment to their faith."
And the Holy Father, speaking about the vineyard and the servants who started disobeying their Master's commands, said it in his homily last Sunday.
He said: "Might not the same thing happen in our time? Nations once rich in faith and vocations are now losing their identity under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture. There are some who, having decided that "God is dead", declare themselves to be "god", considering themselves the only architect of their own destiny, the absolute owner of the world. By ridding himself of God and not expecting salvation from him, man believes he can do as he pleases and that he can make himself the sole judge of himself and his actions.
" However, when man eliminates God from his horizon, declares God "dead", is he really happy? Does he really become freer? When men proclaim themselves the absolute proprietors of themselves and the sole masters of creation, can they truly build a society where freedom, justice and peace prevail? Does it not happen instead - as the daily news amply illustrates - that arbitrary power, selfish interests, injustice and exploitation and violence in all its forms are extended? In the end, man reaches the point of finding himself lonelier and society is more divided and bewildered."
It looked almost as if the Vatican were doing a bit of damage control on Monday after the Pope used the financial crisis as a metaphor for the material world's transience. The Pope was not speaking about economics, Archbishop Claudio Celli underlined in a press conference afterwards, but about the flimsiness of the material world when it was compared with the stability promised in the Word of God.
After all, what does the white-haired guy (whom, incidentally, I love) know about the economy and what is more, isn't he just jumping on the credit-crunch-irresponsible-bankers-bust-crack-down bandwagon?
Wasn't BXVI exposing himself to too much public censure by commenting on the collapse of the world's stock markets? When he said, in front of some 240 bishops, that "those who build on sand do so only on visible and tangible things: on success, career and money" and "these seem to be true reality but one day they will pass away", what can he have been thinking?
Then he said: "We see this now with the fall of the great banks. Money disappears, it becomes nothing. And thus all these things which seem to be real and upon which we can rely, are in fact of secondary importance."
"All human things, all things we can invent and create are finite. So too all human religious experiences are finite. They show only one aspect of reality, because our limited being understands only some parts, some elements.
"Only God is infinite and through him, his Word too is universal and knows no end."
"Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, stable like heaven. Therefore we must change our concept of reality. A realist is one who recognizes that the Word of God - this reality that appears so weak - is in fact the foundation of everything."
And sure enough, only this morning, some bright spark writing a letter over at the International Herald Tribune pointed out:
"It is possibly with tongue-in-cheek that Pope Benedict XVI said the global financial crisis showed that faith in God trumped a lifetime spent pursuing material wealth ('Faith defeats money, Pope says about crisis, October 7')
"The Roman Catholic Church is known to have accumulated its wealth of artworks, real estate and financial resources over two thousand years and various sources consider the Vatican to be one of the richest institutions in the world."
Xiao Ling, Singapore.
Bloomberg, the financial newswire, tried to mount a defence of capitalism by putting it out there that the Pope's criticism of capitalist materialism is mainly motivated by disappointment from the Vatican's own financial losses.
Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bloomberg's reporter on this story, points out, informatively: "The Vatican, the world's smallest country, doesn't just have a spiritual interest in the current turmoil. The papacy relies on earnings from roughly $1 billion in stocks, bonds and real estate to top up donations from Catholics around the world.
"While the Holy See benefited in the 1990s from booming stock markets and a strong dollar, it plunged into the red in 2003 and again in 2007 because of the U.S. currency's tumble, according to the latest financial reports published annually. As the outlook worsens, the pope may have to dip in once again into Peter's Pence, the one source of cash that comes directly from the contributions of the faithful."
It's an old and tired argument, but one which,unfortunately, is trotted out too often: the super-rich Church which steals men's profits in order to gild itself, preen itself in ornate frippery and extensive and valuable art collections is hypocritical when it comes to rendering to Caesar. On one hand its leaders seem to speak about poverty and the evils of materialism, while they appear to be raking in the cash with the other.
But taking into account that there are over a billion Catholics world-wide and the Church is involved in co-ordinating 2,782 dioceses, parishes, churches, aid efforts, humanitarian work, schools and other things, the sum of the Church's assets no longer looks quite so substantial. And as a wise priest once said, "Prayer is vital; but we can't run on Hail Marys alone"
As for imagining that the Pope is following the path of other religious leaders who in recent days have come out slamming the bankers for being irresponsible, forget it. The comments he made on Monday were much further reaching and go much deeper than the obvious superficial points that many have made about the irresponsibility of Wall Street's ruthless capitalism.
In the last year he has spoken about "the folly of the consumerist mindset", has said that the world has grown tired of the "greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses and the pain of false promises". He has touched upon it during his speeches at World Youth Day, in his encyclical Spe Salvi and during his homily to the synod of bishops on Sunday.
Pope Benedict XVI has identified materialism, which both leads to and emanates from relativism, as one of the chief problems of our age-a focus on which leaves us dissatisfied and ever thirsting for more. As he said on July 17:
"This secularist vision seeks to explain human life and shape society with little or no reference to the Creator. It presents itself as neutral, impartial and inclusive of everyone. But in reality, like every ideology, secularism imposes a world-view.
"If God is irrelevant to public life, then society will be shaped in a godless image. When God is eclipsed, our ability to recognize the natural order, purpose, and the "good" begins to wane. What was ostensibly promoted as human ingenuity soon manifests itself as folly, greed and selfish exploitation. And so we have become more and more aware of our need for humility before the delicate complexity of God's world."
It's all biscuits, buttermilk fried chicken, greens, grits and God down here. I head down Billy Graham Parkway-the famous Evangelical Southern Baptist preacher was born in Charlotte, North Carolina-for Charleston and the South.
People are unfailingly polite. I have had more doors opened and hats doffed for me than ever before, by total strangers. It's a strange but rather lovely sensation. The waiters are friendly, people smile and say "hey" on the streets.
There are signs of the election everywhere. Obama-Biden posters plaster the insides of the windows of some of the grand houses of the "battery" where old Charleston still basks in genteel Southern glory. Much further uptown on Meeting Street where the houses are more dilapidated and our bikes almost get stolen by a band of boys with secateurs, the Obama posters still proclaim change.
On Sunday morning, the streets are packed with people dressed up for their Sunday services. To my surprise the large church near our hotel is actually a Catholic cathedral. The South of my mind is populated by evangelical Episcopalians, Baptists and a-million other Christian sects. In this imaginary South, Catholics are an anomaly, a small and insignificant minority, who made in the mold of writer Flannery O'Connor until you get to Louisiana or Texas where the French and Latino influences are too strong to ignore.
Mass is at the mother church of the Carolinas and Georgia. St Mary of the Annunciation Catholic Church is the oldest in the 188-year-old diocese, from where then broke off the diocese of Savannah in 1850 (to which Flannery O'Connor belonged) and the Archdiocese of Atlanta. It was the first Bishop of Charleston, John England, who rebutted President John Quincy Adams's accusations of 1826 that the Catholic Church was an enemy of democracy.
Bishop England spoke out, saying "Our answer is extremely simple and very plain; it is that we would not be bound to obey. . . I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church, outside this Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at our most insignificant balloting box. He has no right to such interference . . . (because there is) a plain distinction between spiritual authority and a right to interfere in the regulations of government . . ."
And yet, despite Bishop England's strong words in front of the House of Representatives, politics are everywhere, coming even if only obliquely, from the pulpit. Or rather, the discussion over the "right to life" versus "a woman's right to choose" is in everyone's mouths and ears. It is Respect Life Sunday, so designated by the United States Bishop's Conference, which lasts for the whole month.
Although Fr Gregory B. Wilson says that "Life is not a political issue. Life is a gift from God and no government can make it otherwise through clever legislation", the elections are inevitably at the forefront of every body's mind. They are only four weeks away. The sagas of John Biden's pro-Choice Catholicism and Nancy Pelosi's personal interpretation of Church teaching are still fresh in the public consciousness.
Fr Wilson, a young looking priest whose Novus Ordo Mass is celebrated with a great deal of reverence and beauty, begins to speak of abortion, starts to examine the rhetoric that goes with the choice of "choice" in the "pro-choice" movement.
After Mass, we light for the open road and real Jesus country-the country that creates prophets like the ones out of Flannery O'Connor's tales-where there is a church at every turn of the road, where snippets from the gospel proclaim the scripture, the kingdom of God. I highly recommend her Southern Gothic novels The Violent Bear it Away and Wise Blood.
Spotting anti-Catholicism at every turn changes swiftly from sensitivity to full-blown paranoia. So when I left the cinema after the new Brideshead film, I tried to stop fuming and was wary of opening my mouth. The film is an extravaganza of colours, jazz, nostalgia and is full of rich images. It is also a cheap attack on Catholicism. My friends have started rolling their eyes every time I cry "anti-Catholic" bias, but this time I feel strangely justified. Support has come from the unlikeliest source: Christopher Hitchens, who for what may be the first time in his life has written something defending Catholicism. Or, rather, attacking the film's anti-Catholicism.
My expectations for the film were pretty standard. It would be a truncated Hollywoodised version of the novel, which stayed fairly true to Waugh's intentions. That cinema is different from television is a truth universally acknowledged, and I didn't think that the film could do anything as slavishly accurate to the book as the legendary BBC series with Jeremy Irons. What I didn't anticipate was that the film would so distort the novel - one of Waugh's most Catholic - to such an extent that Catholicism looked like a mad, destructive and actively evil force.
The hand-sized brass crucifix I found rummaging through boxes at home appears to be a reliquary. I was in search of a replacement rosary among my great-grandmother's things when I discovered it. My generation is, on the whole, fairly unused to devotional objects except in churches, so it took me a few hours to work out what it was.
A twist of the little round screw at the bottom opened it up to show a wealth of relics. Nothing gruesome, just seven little gold paper filigree flowers each covered with another little piece of paper bearing a saint's name. Unfortunately these are very faded, but I can work out "Adrian", "Bonifaz", "Agatl" and "Pius". In the middle, a quilled Sacred Heart nestles; the crown of thorns is made either of hair or thread. On the back of the crucifix there appears a pictorial meditation on the crucifixion: the gaming dice, Christ's clothes, a ladder and a scourge, the Sacred Heart and the three nails. I think it is late 19th or early 20th century.
Relics can be a taboo subject. Some people hate talking about them. There is something that feels very un-21st century about keeping bones or fabric connected to a person who has long been dead and then venerating it. For some, it is one of the Catholic Church's embarrassing secrets, a practice that should have been relegated to a drawer in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford to keep the witch in the silver bottle and the shrunken heads company.
And yet what agnostic person has not at some point treasured a memento, a card signed by a particularly famous singer or a jersey which belonged to a footballer or shorts belonging to Mohammad Ali. These things are apart and removed from daily life, assigned a special meaning. And yet - to argue this is dangerous - because it brings one to the inevitable question: how are these relics different from the relics of the holy people whom we venerate in the Church and ask to intercede for us?
Before you get angry, pause. These are merely questions that a weak defence of Catholic thought brings forward: there is no way of presenting a strong argument about Christian teaching without Christ and through him the possibility of salvation. In the current "dictatorship of relativism" Christianity has, in the popular consciousness, been reduced to one logical system among many - which makes it very difficult to argue any Christian point without the premise of Christ.
My question for this diary is: how do we bring Christ to those for whom His love is an inconceivable reality? It will be a journey through my own Faith, because, as St Thomas Aquinas points out somewhere, the Truth will withstand questioning.
But in the meantime, can someone please tell me how to use this reliquary properly?
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