Notes: Wednesday, July 13-Tuesday, July 19, 2011 (part 1 of 2)

1. Interesting discussion on Assisi III

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/07/card-levada-opines-about-the-upcoming-assisi-meeting/#comments

Labels: Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, ecumenism, inter-religious dialogue

2. Mr. Muehlenberg on the A.B.C. and its recent Compass episode on so-called gay marriage

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/07/11/the-abc-should-be-put-out-of-its-misery/

(See also Mr. Clarkson's comment of 13.7.11 / 2pm in that post's combox; his comment deals with the first episode of what was apparently a two-part series.) The remarks by Prof. Altman as recorded in the episode transcript are of particular interest. (See this web-page for a follow-up piece by Mr. Muehlenberg on one of those remarks and gay polyamory.)

Labels: A.B.C., Compass, Dennis Altman, Frank Brennan, G.L.B.T., marriage, morality, polyamory

3. Msgr. de Galarreta with some quotations from then-Cardinal Ratzinger

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38113

Labels: Benedict XVI. Ratzinger

4. Fr. Zuhlsdorf on the nine ways in which one might "participate in the sin of another person"

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/07/quaeritur-participation-in-the-sins-of-other-people/

Labels: morality

5. "[Ireland's] Justice Minister Alan Shatter vowed to bring in ... new laws" under which priests "will be jailed for up to five years if they fail to report paedophiles to gardai -- even if they are told of the abuse in the confession box"

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/priests-will-be-jailed-if-they-dont-report-abuse-2821151.html

(That web-page came to my attention via this AQ comment.) Related coverage:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/vatican-ignored-abuse-guidelines-irish-report-finds-20110714-1hfxt.html?skin=text-only

http://www.smh.com.au/world/irish-child-abuse-report-attacks-vatican-and-powerful-bishop-20110714-1hfzy.html?skin=text-only

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=27239

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38149

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38195

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38200

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=27270

Labels: Alan Shatter, Ireland, sexual abuse

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Vincent de Paul, Confessor, A.D. 2011

Notes: Thursday, October 14, 2010

A good question from Ms Farrelly

In the Herald today:

Fine's insistence that boys and girls are born with identical brains does not explain how an un-gendered mind, fully steeped in boy-type context, can reach adulthood with the life-or-death conviction that it is actually, profoundly, female. How could that happen? [http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gender-and-feminism-a-guilt-trip-20101013-16jyv.html?skin=text-only]

Interesting opinion piece by Mr. Sheridan

in today's Australian. An excerpt:

Like World Youth Day, the canonisation of Mary is one of those fairly rare occasions when popular Catholicism breaks through the gatekeepers of official culture in Australia and commands some mainstream attention.

Christianity generally is massively under-regarded in Australia. More people go to church every Sunday than go to football, but the media coverage is hardly commensurate.

I cannot recall seeing Pell on ABC1's Q&A, yet there is a Muslim representative on about every fourth episode of that show. There's certainly nothing wrong with having Muslims on the show, but it's almost as if there is a policy that any mainstream Catholic Church leader is ipso facto boring, not to be listened to or simply not a suitable person to participate in the mainstream media.

This is a sign both of a kind of immature provincialism in our culture and a serious ongoing prejudice against orthodox Christianity of any kind.

There is, of course, specific anti-Catholic prejudice, of the kind seen in the ridiculous treatment of Tony Abbott on ABC1's Four Corners when he became leader of the Liberal Party.

This kind of prejudice used to be called the anti-Semitism of the intellectual and its tired persistence in Australian culture is sad, not only because of the unfairness of the prejudice but because of the consequence it has of the media missing so big a part of modern life.

[...] Of course, all the great secular dictators have taken the church seriously and understood it is one of their most formidable opponents. This is partly because the universality of the Catholic Church transcends all national borders.

Adolf Hitler planned to abolish the papacy and set up a separate pope in every country he ruled. ...
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/attack-on-christianity-will-undermine-society/story-e6frg6zo-1225938377118]

That last sentence came as a surprise to me, though; I hadn't heard about that before. Also, while Protestantism might have been 'foundational' for "secularism", Catholicism certainly wasn't, and only hopped on that bandwagon in recent decades i.e. with Vatican II.

Msgr. Hart contra Mr. Pead (and vice versa)

This comment in a thread at AQ brought to my attention an interesting pair of letters to Christian Order regarding the late-2003/early-2004 scandal over Knights of the Southern Cross/Freemason co-operation and fraternisation:

http://www.christianorder.com/features/features_2004/features_apr04_bonus.html

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Callistus I., Pope, Martyr, A.D. 2010

Notes: Wednesday, July 14, 2010

More on the firing of a Catholic university lecturer for stating--simply stating, apparently regardless of whether he agreed or disagreed with it--Catholic/natural-law doctrine on morality

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32491
http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32436
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=22376

According to those reports (this quotation comes from the last of the three),

An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell's e-mail "hate speech." The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.

"Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing," the student wrote. "Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another."

So apparently Dr. Howell was not, as I suggested in yesterday's edition of Notes, fired for openly agreeing with the natural law's prohibition of sodomy, but simply for stating it! Of course, the problem with the complainant's objection is: What if "the tenets of a [certain] religion" declare "that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of [more precisely, the natural law pertaining to/binding on] man"?

More on Church of England moves towards having ladybishops

http://www.smh.com.au/world/church-of-england-paves-way-for-female-bishops-20100713-109ha.html?skin=text-only
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=22378

New A.B.C. Religion and Ethics portal

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=22379

U.R.L. for the portal: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/

H.H. The Pope declares "Religious freedom, the path to peace" to be the theme for the 2011 World Day of Peace

The only item in today's Vatican Information Service e-mail bulletin:

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, THE PATH TO PEACE

VATICAN CITY, 13 JUL 2010 (VIS) - "Religious freedom, the path to peace" is the theme chosen by Pope Benedict XVI for the celebration of the 2011 World Day of Peace.

"The World Day of Peace", reads a communique on the subject released today, "will therefore be dedicated to the theme of religious freedom. It is well known that in many parts of the world there are various forms of restriction or denial of religious freedom, from discrimination and marginalisation based on religion, to acts of violence against religious minorities".

"Religious freedom is authentically realised when it is experienced as the coherent search for truth and for the truth about man. This approach to religious freedom offers us a fundamental criterion for discerning the phenomenon of religion and its expressions. It necessarily rejects the 'religiosity' of fundamentalism, and the manipulation of truth and of the truth about man. Since such distortions are opposed to the dignity of man and to the search for truth, they cannot be considered as religious freedom".

The communique recalls words Benedict XVI's pronounced before the United Nations General Assembly in 2008: "Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer".

The text continues: "Today there are many areas of the world in which forms of restrictions and limitations to religious freedom persist, both where communities of believers are a minority, and where communities of believers are not a minority, and where more sophisticated forms of discrimination and marginalisation exist, on the cultural level and in the spheres of public, civil and political activity. 'It is inconceivable', as Benedict XVI remarked, 'that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one's rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature'".

The communique concludes by highlighting how "man cannot be fragmented, and separated from what he believes, because that in which he believes has an impact on his life and on his person. 'Refusal to recognise the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute - by its nature, expressing communion between persons - would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person'. It is for this reason that: 'Religious Freedom is the Path to Peace'".
.../ VIS 20100713 (470)

Sad. Fortunately this is only an act of the Ordinary Magisterium; for the teaching of the Ordinary and Universal--and hence infallible--Magisterium, see the comments by "Pax Vobiscum" at this AQ thread on the matter of the 2011 World Day of Peace theme.

Interesting AQ thread on Creationism:

Particularly the comments by "Blandina":

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32468

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Bonaventure, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor of the Church, A.D. 2010

Secularism vs. The Church after WYD08: war of attrition

http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s2316508.htm

No, the word ‘deaconess’ was not used (not even once!) but we did hear the classic “trying to learn new ways to be church”! This week’s installment of Compass was, perhaps unsurprisingly, even worse than last week’s drivel, since it was even weaker and less substantial. Again we had a group of interviewees who all either dissented from or failed adequately to stand up for the impossibility of women’s ordination. With this week’s interviewees it became all the clearer to me how unprofessional and open to abuse this ‘documentary’ format (as opposed to the traditional, formal question-and-answer interview) is. Although the tone was not as stridently tendentious as last week’s episode, it was clear that the producers wanted to portray the invalidity of women ‘Orders’ as a matter of injustice, and the style of interview facilitated this nicely; it seemed that it drew the interviewees into either agreeing with or at least not dissenting from the editorial position. What exactly were the questions put to them?

But the producers of this tripe are not fools; they know that there is no theological basis for women’s Orders, as one can tell by their failure to involve any expert commentators, such as theologians or canon lawyers, like in last week’s episode. But this only weakened the story further, since the thoughts of the interviewees were wishy-washy at best, a grab-bag of the usual talk of ‘exclusion’ and vague feelings of injustice. Also absent from this programme was a failure to involve any women who were both perfectly happy with their state in life and able eloquently to stand up for women’s contributions to the Church (our Holy Mother) in marriage and family or the religious life. But we have come to expect this kind of bias.

Interestingly, Cathnews indicates that next week’s Compass will be another Catholic story, reporting on an Irish Priest who, among others things, conducted an affair with his housekeeper. Presumably this is meant to reinforce last week’s attempt to portray celibacy as unrealistic. It seems that the A.B.C. is perfectly prepared to prosecute its anti-Catholic campaign as a war of attrition. And we here at this virtual Lambeth Palace are prepared to man the trenches for as long as it takes.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Secularism vs. The Church after WYD08: the opening barrage

http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s2309743.htm

On the night that World Youth Day festivities came to a close, the A.B.C. launched its counter-offensive against the Church with an episode of Compass entitled “Catholic Dilemma: Part 1: - Sex or celibacy”. Presumably one is supposed to categorise it as a documentary, but it was so totally biased that it is no exaggeration to describe it as a piece of advocacy, advocacy for the insidious agenda of the ‘Catholics for Ministry’ set. This ‘documentary’ failed to explain in a remotely adequate way the meaning of the Mass as a True Sacrifice and the importance of celibacy for the Priest in associating himself with Christ, i.e. the importance of celibacy for theological reasons rather than practical reasons; is it really too hard to convey that the Priesthood is primarily sacrificial rather than pastoral (contrary to Vatican II’s re-orientations as enshrined in the 1983 C.I.C., see here for more on this: http://christianorder.com/features/features_2001/features_nov01.html) and that whoever will not renounce marriage and family (the second biggest sacrifice that one can make, next after the sacrifice of life and limb) is not worthy of being the one through whom Christ offers Himself to the Father?

Now, this is to be expected from a secular humanist programme (since the humanist can only ever understand celibacy as a means to the end of ‘greater availability’; for him man is the end of all things, so that even if he tries to understand things with God in the picture he can only ever see the value of celibacy in utilitarian terms rather than as a sacrifice offered directly to God—see here http://news.stjamescatholic.org/2006/week51/index.html for H.H. The Pope’s thoughts on the matter, under the title “Benedict XVI Meets Roman Curia For Christmas Greetings”) but what was inexcusable was the biased selection of interviewees, who were all either opposed or seemingly neutral to the question of celibacy; none offered (or was allowed to offer) an articulate, cogent justification for celibacy, though one did offer a timid, materialistic argument based on the cost of supporting a married Priest’s family. What I found most remarkable of all, though, was that by a brilliant rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Mr. Paul Collins was able to position himself and, by association, his fellow-travellers in ‘Catholics for Ministry’ as the defenders of the Catholic understanding of Mass against creeping Protestantism! Listen to this (from Mr. Collins himself):

We’re talking about the unavailability of Mass and the Sacraments. We’re talking
about replacing the celebration of Mass with readings from Scripture and a
communion service. Now with respect, I mean I have a fairly good record
ecumenically, but with respect that’s a more Protestant approach and I don’t
belong to a Protestant Church nor do I intend to join one. I belong to the
Catholic Church. And at the core of Catholic belief is the Mass. And if we don’t
have the Mass then it seems to me we are taking away from the essence of being
Catholic.

No mention of sacrifice or anything, of course; the word only appears once during the course of the show, and not in a strictly theological sense.

Surely the producers could have found, somewhere in this wide brown land, a forthright defender of the gift of celibacy? Just a single apologist for this venerable norm? Instead the producers took care to portray the requirement for celibacy as a mere matter of positive law (achieved by the use of a non-cassock-wearing Jesuit canon lawyer), with the possibility of a theological dimension rejected through Mr. Collins.

Add to these shortcomings the usual stereotypes of Rome and the Australian hierarchy as out-of-touch and unresponsive, in contrast to the two former priests, the married convert from Anglicanism and a ‘pastoral leader’ nun, hard at work (over-worked, even) at the “front line” and you have a piece of journalism that gives only one side of the argument. It was truly dreadful. One can hardly wait to see what rubbish they’ll offer next week (I expect the word ‘deaconess’ will get a good showing).

Reginaldvs Cantvar