Casa Santa Lidia

Impressive

2012-01-08T13:46:00.001-08:00

Isaac Newton's examination of conscience.

Sheep

2012-01-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

Awesome sheep video.

Domini canes: snowball fight

2012-01-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

Jesulein O:)

2011-12-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

Here's to a happy and holy 2012!

You know something's wrong when they start clapping...

2011-12-27T14:29:00.001-08:00

Jauchzet!

2011-12-25T06:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas Hymn in Arabic

2011-12-24T06:49:00.000-08:00

A little Hanukkah music! O:)

2011-12-20T14:28:00.000-08:00

Yay for the Maccabees!!!

Mester M.S., c. 1500

2011-12-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

My favorite Visitation, by the otherworldy "M.S. Master" of Hungary.

Dynamic spheres

2011-12-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

BL, Harley MS 3487. f.65v - 13th c.

No, everyone did not think the earth was flat and the universe static.

The "relative" in external forms

2011-12-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Laetare Sunday, 30 March, 2003; from the Foreword to "Turning Towards the Lord":

"To the ordinary churchgoer, the two most obvious effects of the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council seem to be the disappearance of Latin and the turning of the altars towards the people. Those who read the relevant texts will be astonished to learn that neither is in fact found in the decrees of the Council. The use of the vernacular is certainly permitted, especially for the Liturgy of the Word, but the preceding general rule of the Council text says, 'Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites' (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 36.1).

"There is nothing in the Council text about turning altars towards the people; that point is raised only in postconciliar instructions. The most important directive is found in paragraph 262 of the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, the General Instruction of the new Roman Missal, issued in 1969. That says, 'It is better for the main altar to be constructed away from the wall so that one can easily walk around the altar and celebrate facing the people (versus populum).' The General Instruction of the Missal issued in 2002 retained this text unaltered except for the addition of the subordinate clause, 'which is desirable wherever possible'. This was taken in many quarters as hardening the 1969 text to mean that there was now a general obligation to set up altars facing the people 'wherever possible'.

"This interpretation, however, was rejected by the Congregation for Divine Worship on 25 September 2000, when it declared that the word 'expedit' ('is desirable') did not imply an obligation but only made a suggestion. The physical orientation, the Congregation says, must be distinguished from the spiritual. Even if a priest celebrates versus populum, he should always be oriented versus Deum per Iesum Christum (towards God through Jesus Christ). Rites, signs, symbols, and words can never exhaust the inner reality of the mystery of salvation. For this reason the Congregation warns against one-sided and rigid positions in this debate.

"This is an important clarification. It sheds light on what is relative in the external symbolic forms of the liturgy and resists the fanaticisms that, unfortunately, have not been uncommon in the controversies of the last forty years."

Jaki Lecture: Professor Dyson

2011-11-29T11:55:00.001-08:00

"I can't consult you if you don't know Latin."

2011-11-26T08:17:00.001-08:00

Sums it up nicely. A Latin translator to one of the lay faithful who complained about "not being consulted" on the new edition of the Roman Missal: "I can't consult you if you don't know Latin."

How would I consult you, assuming that you do not know Latin like the majority of Catholics alive today, about the translation of the following:

Da, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus,
hanc tuis fidelibus voluntatem,
ut, Christo tuo venienti iustis operibus occurrentes,
eius dextrae sociati, regnum mereantur possidere caeleste.

(according to Fr. Z., this is a new prayer for the Novus Ordo but based on ancient prayer from the so-called “Gelasian Sacramentary”).

Really, the floor is yours. Even though you know no Latin, I'm consulting you. What do you recommend? What's the verdict?

Conditor Alme Siderum

2011-11-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

Inaugural Fr. Stanley L. Jaki Lecture at Seton Hall

2011-11-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

"Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, was the inaugural lecturer of the Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B. Distinguished Lecture of the Department of Physics at Seton Hall University on Monday, November 14, 2011. The special lecture was held in the Helen Lerner Amphitheatre in McNulty Hall and is part of the President's Advisory Council Distinguished Guest Lecturer Series sponsored by the President’s Advisory Council members.

"Freeman Dyson is considered to be one of the greatest living thinkers and intellectuals on the topics of science and technology. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields – physics, biology, history, philosophy, and theology.

"Professor Dyson’s lecture entitled “Living through Four Revolutions” will provide a first-hand witness reflection on the history of science and technology over the last half century. In particular, his contemplation will be about the four modern scientific and technological revolutions which were space, nuclear energy, genomics, and electronic computing. He’ll look at how these revolutions started, how they slowly transformed the world during the past half century, and how they are still transforming it today."

Up for grabs...

2011-11-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

'In a graduate seminar some years ago, one of my less accomplished students wrote a paper about the late A.J.P. Taylor, whose self-congratulatory memoir exaggerates both his socialism and his patriotism. Accordingly the student decided that Taylor was a National Socialist. When I suggested that such a sobriquet specifically applied to Hitler's Germany, he responded, "That's your opinion." So it was. Still, whatever controversy Taylor's Origins of the Second World War stirred when it was published in 1961, to call him a National Socialist reflects an appalling ignorance of a diabolical 20th-century ideology. After further protests by the student, I insisted that he was simply wrong, that A.J.P.Taylor was not a National Socialist and that it was not a matter of opinion. All of which succeeded only in costing me points in the annual evaluation, where students are asked to rate the faculty on a long list of desirable qualities, including, "Does the instructor encourage students to express opinions?"'

From Abe Kriegel's classic essay, "Up for Grabs."

"We love each other because we're married."

2011-11-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

I borrowed one of my posts from "Truth, Goodness & Beauty":

Couples will say: “We’re married because we love each other.” But there is also an older and perhaps more meaningful expression: “We love each other because we’re married.” When my grandparents married they did not love each other: they did not know each other. Like many marriages in their part of the world in 1890, it was essentially an arranged marriage, solemnized with a ketubah (marriage contract) like the one above. Did they ever “fall in love” or grow to love each other? I don’t know. Were they happy? I have no idea. They had ten children, the youngest of whom was my father. They addressed each other formally – as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” – just like Dr. Meade and Mrs. Meade in Gone With the Wind. My grandmother died in 1938, and my grandfather, though he had not been ill, died less than two months later. I will go ahead and assume that they loved each other - because they were married.

Some people think celibate clergy do not have the right to teach or counsel anyone about marriage since they are single. But I would rather go to a good doctor who had had years of training and who had seen my kind of illness hundreds if not thousands of times, in many different people, rather than demand to receive treatment from someone who had had the disease himself. Sometimes, in doing tribunal work, in reviewing case after case of failed marriages, patterns begin to appear, stories begin to sound very familiar, and the only surprise is that those who seek a declaration of nullity (not an “annulment” – a word which, as I've mentioned many times, doesn’t even appear in the Code of Canon Law) often seem to reveal aspects of their marriage to the tribunal which I suspect they would not even mention in confession.

And so even as a single person, I can attest to the fact that, unfortunately, some of what prompts people to marry – not lacking due discretion of judgment but sometimes against their better judgment in many ways, and in very subtle ways – is fear, primarily fear of being alone. In the testimonies that every tribunal must review for its nullity cases, this is a theme heard over and over again. Many will say, “I was afraid being old alone or of dying alone,” not realizing that at least among women, seventy-five percent of us end up alone in our later years anyway (never married, widowed or divorced).

I think I can assure everyone that as difficult as single life is at times, there are far worse things to face in life than waking up alone every morning, or spending Christmas or other holidays on one’s own. What’s worse? From all that I’ve gathered, this: waking up next to someone, once beloved, who has become a stranger, and dreading going home to see one’s family for the holidays, knowing it will take weeks to recover from the trauma and that the painful memories of what Uncle Helmut or your sister-in-law did or said will last for a lifetime, casting a pall on all subsequent family gatherings.

But it is normal to want to love and be loved, in a definitive way and not merely as a passing romance. It is not good for us to be alone, as Someone we know and love once said. The fear of being alone is so profound, so primal, that it steers otherwise bright and capable people toward decisions they may come to regret. And on that day of regret, they want “out” – which is something secular society broadly promotes. But as Blessed Pope John Paul II taught us, human beings are not disposable (divorce), nor interchangeable (remarriage), nor are they to be made the objects of experimentation (living together or “trial marriage”).

In a recent article in The Tablet (or what Fr. Z. calls The Bitter Pill) there is a plea for the Catholic Church to do what our Orthodox brethren do with the numerous failed marriages in our times. In many, but not all, Orthodox Churches (remember: no central authority, so no true consistency of doctrine or approach to this, only some loosely applied sense of oikonomia), a member of the faithful is allowed a first, sacramental marriage. If that fails, especially if the person in question is the innocent party, then a second, non-sacramental “marriage” is permitted, usually after some sort of “penitential” period. If the second one fails, then the person is permitted a third, non-sacramental “marriage” – but not a fourth one! Have to draw the line somewhere. Have to have some standards.

As I hope any Catholic can see, this is completely unworkable for a number of reasons. In the first place, the first and only marriage, a sacrament, is still there. A valid matrimonial bond can only be dissolved by death and doesn’t “go away” no matter how much one wants it to, no matter how painful or cold the relationship, no matter which spouse abandoned the other, or no matter how badly one spouse treats the other (and I am not going to tackle the Pauline and Petrine privileges in this forum…). It is true that on occasion, severe problems in a marriage can be indicative of an antecedent incapacity to contract marriage or of an intention to enter into something other than marriage, but such cases are (or should be) quite rare. So this second non-sacramental “marriage”…would be what? Adultery or concubinage permitted by the Church? And if that is the view of the human person (and not wanting to cause an ecumenical kerfuffle here…), then would it not make more sense for the Orthodox to allow an initial non-sacramental “marriage” or whatever, and if that fails then another, and then eventually and finally – third time’s the charm? – admit the person to a full sacramental marriage now that he has it all figured out? Now that he has matured and has learned how to treat another human being?

People often say of marriage, “I had no idea what I was getting into.” Of course not. People never know what they are getting into when they embark upon a new situation in life. It is the same with having children. Even if couples wait years for a child, and anticipate every aspect of childrearing, it is another matter altogether when the little one finally arrives. A couple I know had their first child in their thirties – they are both academics – and the little creature reduced them to utter helplessness within hours. The baby cried,screamed, round the clock. They could not let go of her or put her down for a moment. She was healthy; but she could not bear being out of her mother’s arms (or her father’s, as a tolerable substitute). The baby was not a good eater, nor did she sleep much, at least not at normal times. Formerly in control of all aspects of their lives, these two intellectuals were now at their wits’ end. And one cannot divorce the child or “send it back” and get another, better one – though I seem to recall this has been tried.

Some say that Catholics should not, or even cannot, receive the Sacrament of Matrimony if they lack faith. But it is impossible to go the route of a faith litmus test for couples. Provided they are validly baptized, and it has been determined, as it must be ahead of time, that there are no impediments, and they have some minimal understanding and acceptance of marriage as permanent, faithful and ordered to the procreation of children (not needing to know the mechanics of everything, but just some general idea), the bar is set very low. Catholics cannot be prohibited from receiving the Sacrament of Matrimony, even if the people preparing the couple – the families, the parish staff – think things might not turn out well. Take the case of a spoiled teenager about to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation. She is only going through with it because her mother is insisting on it, and her father has promised her a big party and a new car. The girl has no interest in the Catholic faith, can hardly wait to stop being dragged to Mass every Sunday with her parents, and has no intention of living as a practicing Catholic once she leaves for college. But if she presents herself along with her classmates to the bishop – and she’s just willful enough so that if she truly did not want the Sacrament she’d dig in her heels – then it is a validly, if not fruitfully, received Sacrament. The grace is there, will be there, if she ever has a change of heart.

The new and prevailing theology of marriage is very beautiful, but I remain not entirely convinced of the wisdom or utility of turning it into canon law. The old “contract” model has given way to the new “covenant” model of marriage. I know a devout Catholic man who has engraved on the inside of his wedding band, “…as Christ loved the Church.” When I related that to another young Catholic married woman, she burst out laughing: “Really? I can’t even get my husband to pick up his socks!” And as beautiful as it is to see the marriage relationship as similar to that of God and His people or Christ and the Church, it is also important to remember that it does not exactly denote a relationship of equality.

Speaking of contracts, for your perusal and edification, the link below has a slideshow of some of the lovely ketubot like the one at the top of the post, which are still used in the Jewish tradition, from a different sort of Tablet:

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/61282/unveiled/

Vocations crisis???

2011-10-28T16:06:00.001-07:00

Repeat
after
me:
There

no
"vocations crisis"
. [full stop]
O.k.
so
repeat
after
me
again:
There
is
no
"vocations crisis"
. [another full stop}
Any
questions?

The first 57 people in line to the throne were Catholic

2011-10-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

The 58th was a Protestant: George I

From the Daily Mail:

RE-WRITING HISTORY: WE'D NOW BE SINGING GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS KING HAD LAWS NOT BEEN INTRODUCED

Franz, Duke of Bavaria, could have ended up on the British throne had laws been different

Had an 18th Century law not been passed by Parliament, Britain's monarchy throughout the past 300 years would have had a very different cast of characters.

For starters, rather than becoming one of the most recognisable faces in the world, our present Queen would have spent her life as a minor princess in some German backwater.

And instead of pledging allegiance to Elizabeth II, loyal British subjects would now be singing God Save Our Gracious King to... Francis II of Bavaria.

The 1701 Act Of Settlement passed the crown to Electress Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant descendants - and banned all Roman Catholics from ever ascending the throne.

That law - and the centuries-old practice of male primogeniture, in which a male child automatically leapfrogs over his older sisters - has largely dictated who became King or Queen of Britain for centuries.

But according to historian Ian Lloyd writing in the Sunday Times, had these ancient laws not been adopted, Francis II would now be ruling Brittania.

Franz, Duke of Bavaria, is a distant cousin of the Queen and head of the House of Wittelsbach, Bavaria's ruling family. He is the senior co-heir-general of King Charles I and therefore regarded as the rightful heir to the House of Stuart, which ruled England from 1567 to 1707. From birth Franz was recognised by the Jacobites as a Prince of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Prince of Cornwall and Rothesay.

The Duke's great-grandfather was the last king of Bavaria before being deposed at the end of World War One in 1918.

During World War Two, the Dukes' family condemned the Nazi regime and fled to Hungary. When Hitler's stormtroopers marched into Budapest in 1944, the Royal Family was arrested and detained in a number of concentration camps.

Following liberation in 1945, Franz, studied business management at the University of Munich. Now 78, he still lives in an apartment in the city and is a keen collector of modern art.

Tonsure 2011, Denton NE

2011-10-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

16 tonsured for the FSSP, 1 for the Redemptorists of Papa Stronsay. Second from right is Chris, second from left is Tony. Source: http://papastronsay.blogspot.com/2011/10/sharing-26000-words-of-gratitude-to-god.html

New edition of a wonderful book!

2011-10-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Foreword by Joseph Pearce

Afterword by Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford

Edited by Alcuin Reid

'English author Evelyn Waugh, most famous for his novel Brideshead Revisited, became a Roman Catholic in 1930. For the last decade of his life, however, Waugh experienced the changes being made to the Church's liturgy to be nothing short of "a bitter trial". In John Cardinal Heenan, Waugh found a sympathetic pastor and somewhat of a kindred spirit.

'This volume brings together the personal correspondence between Waugh and Heenan during the 1960s, a trying period for many faithful Catholics. It begins with a 1962 article Waugh wrote for the Spectator followed by a response from then Archbishop Heenan, who at the time was a participant at the Second Vatican Council. These and the other writings included in this book paint a vivid picture of two prominent and loyal English Catholics who lamented the loss of Latin and the rupture of tradition that resulted from Vatican II.

'In the light of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, many Catholics are looking again at the post-conciliar liturgical changes. To this "reform of the reform" of the liturgy now underway in the Roman Catholic Church, both Heenan and Waugh have much to contribute.'

E-book! http://www.ignatius.com/Products/BITT-E/a-bitter-trial.aspx?src=iinsight

http://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Trial-Cardinal-Liturgical-Changes/dp/158617522X

Must read interview on NLM

2011-10-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

'I am not a “traditionalist”. I am a Catholic. I am also a liturgical historian. As the latter I can say that there is evidence that those responsible for the reform intended rupture – ritual and also theological. They did not want what was handed on in tradition. They did not want to develop that. They wanted something new, something that would reflect ‘modern man’ in the 1960’s and what they thought he needed. This is an historical reality, not an ecclesio-political position. Liturgists from ‘both sides’ agree that the reform was radical and a rupture. As a Catholic I regard this as a significant problem, because it is unprecedented in liturgical history and it is not what the Council, out of respect for liturgical tradition, called for.'

Nafpaktos! 440th anniversary...

2011-10-07T05:41:00.000-07:00

Our Lady of Victories and of the Rosary, pray for us.

squeeeeeeeeeeeee!

2011-10-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

[ "I DON'T CONTROL THE ADS," as Fr. Z. would say.. ]

Worth considering: Simplex priests and intinction

2011-09-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

Two ideas worth considering at this time in the Latin Church.

Venerable Solanus Casey, pray for us:

http://frvanhove.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/simplex-priests-now/

And:

http://www.adoremus.org/0903Intinction.html

Fr. Mark asks:

Why is Pope Paul VI's Sacramentali Communione (29 June 1970) systematically ignored? I give the relevant passages here in boldface:

Among the ways of communicating prescribed by the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, receiving from the chalice itself ranks first. Even so, it is to be chosen only when everything can be carried out in fitting order and with no danger of irreverence toward the Blood of Christ. When they are available, other priests or deacons or even acolytes should be chosen to present the chalice. The method of communicating in which the communicants pass the chalice to one another or go directly to the chalice to take Christ's Blood must be regarded as unacceptable.

Whenever none of the ministers already mentioned is available, if the communicants are few and are to receive communion under both kinds by drinking directly from the chalice, the priest himself distributes communion, first under the form of bread, then under the form of wine.

Otherwise the preference should be for the rite of communion under both kinds by intinction: it is more likely to obviate the practical difficulties and to ensure the reverence due the sacrament more effectively. Intinction makes access to communion under both kinds easier and safer for the faithful of all ages and conditions; at the same time it preserves the truth present in the more complete sign.

~~~

And (except for that bit about the vernacular!) more good ideas from Fr. Boyle HERE.

Science changes every few years. Why base your belief system on it?

2011-09-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

From Time: Was Einstein Wrong? A faster-than-light neutrino could be saying yes.

The trouble with Kant: couldn't have said it better myself

2011-09-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

From The New Yorker article on Derek Parfit (September 5th, 2011, issue):

"He felt that the crucial Kantian idea of autonomy, for instance, was just a blatant cheat: Kant wanted there to be a universally valid moral law, and wanted every person to have the moral autonomy to determine the law for himself, and he just couldn't accept that you couldn't have both those things at once:

I asked a Kantian, 'Does this mean that, if I don't give myself Kant's Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?' 'No,' I was told, 'you have to give yourself a law, and there's only one law.' This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called People's Democracies of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said, 'But I haven't given myself Kant's Imperative as a law,' I was told, 'Yes you have.'"

Truth, Goodness & Beauty

2011-09-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

Father Christopher Smith's new blog:

http://revolutionarytraditionalist.tumblr.com/

Μελλοντα ταυτα

2011-09-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

Not on sad Stygian shore, nor in clear sheen

Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those

Among the dead whose pupils we have been,

Nor those great shades whom we have held as foes;

No meadow of asphodel our feet shall tread,

Nor shall we look each other in the face

To love or hate each other being dead,

Hoping some praise, or fearing some disgrace.

We shall not argue saying "'Twas thus" or "Thus,"

Our argument's whole drift we shall forget;

Who's right, who's wrong, 'twill be all one to us;

We shall not even know that we have met.

Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,

Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

- Samuel Butler

A Pierre Duhem anniversary

2011-09-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.ilsussidiario.net/News/Scienze/2011/9/7/ANNIVERSARI-Pierre-Duhem-ovvero-il-pregiudizio-ribaltato/205275/

(hit Google translate -- it's worth it!)

"Science and Faith in Stanley Jaki" July 11 to 13, Madrid

2011-08-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

Ciencia y fe en Stanley Jaki

11 - 13 de julio en el Colegio Mayor San Pablo CEU de Madrid

Many thanks to Lucia for organizing such a wonderful course on Father Jaki!

The historian as social climber

2011-08-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

"The overweening historian is a recurrent figure in British literature over the past century. Brilliantly talented and flamboyant, he—it is invariably a “he”—seeks, more often than not, adulation and celebrity as much as scholarly acclaim. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for example, there is the historian as social climber. Mr. Samgrass of All Souls is an obsessive chronicler of the aristocracy..."

In paradisum deducant te Angeli: Prof. László Dobszay, 1935-2011

2011-08-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Photo above: discussion with Rev. Thomas Kocik, The East School, Oxford

Photo above: the "Hungarian caucus" at Merton College, Oxford.

A great loss: Professor László Dobszay passed away earlier today at age 77.

Two of my photos from a wonderful week at Merton College, Oxford, for CIEL 2006.

Hosszú betegség után életének 77. évében pénteken elhunyt Dobszay László Széchenyi-díjas zenetörténész, karnagy, a Széchenyi Irodalmi és Művészeti Akadémia volt elnöke, a Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem professor emeritusa.

"László Dobszay passed away on Friday at age 77 after a long illness; he was a Széchenyi Prize winnning historian of music, choir director, past President of the Széchenyi Academy of Arts and Letters (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and Professor Emeritus of the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music."

eek

2011-08-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Schools refusing to offer GCSEs in history

Again: it's a crisis in religious life, not a vocations crisis

2011-08-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

Nuns a "dying breed" -- ?

The Sisters of Iesu Communio

About 1.5 to 2 million young Catholics in Madrid this weekend

UPDATE: New Abbess of Sainte-Cecile, Solemnes

En union de prières avec la nouvelle abbesse de Solesmes.

Le 25 juin 2011, le Père Abbé de Solesmes a présidé le chapitre d’élection d’une nouvelle abbesse et confirmé le choix des moniales : Mère Claire de Sazilly qui exerçait alors la fonction de maîtresse des novices devenait la sixième abbesse de Sainte-Cécile. Âgée de 36 ans, issue d'une famille nombreuse ayant ses racines en Anjou, elle est entrée au monastère à l'âge de 18 ans, précédée dans la vie monastique par deux de ses tantes. Elle recevra la bénédiction abbatiale en la fête de la Nativité de la Bienheureuse Vierge Marie, le 8 septembre 2011.

PAX

Abbaye sainte Cécile

Another update, this time a jaw-dropper (click on quote below):

'I graduated from my Christian Brothers high school in 1965, and over the next few years, through various sources, heard about one after another of my former teachers leaving the order. Today, the school is “in the tradition” of the Christian Brothers, with lay teachers only. The sister school, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy, is now “sponsored” by the Sisters of Mercy. I don’t believe there are any nuns on the faculty, and the principal is man. The parish grade school I had gone to, in which most of the teachers were nuns, now doesn’t exist. My old parish and two others now run a single school.

What happened?'

WHAT HAPPENED???

Rabbi Sacks on "London Undone"

2011-08-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

Reversing the Decay of London Undone

LINK TO WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE: Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild

~

By JONATHAN SACKS

It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.

It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

~

—Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

Generosity

2011-08-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

On the anniversary of Father Jaki's birth

2011-08-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

On this day, in gratitude for his wonderful life, a 1994 interview with a glimpse of his childhood and early days at Pannonhalma:

http://czuczor.osb.hu/jsz.wmv

A translation of the interview:

An Interview with Father Stanley Jaki

Interviewer: Your books and studies have been published in Hungarian since 1987 when you were awarded the Templeton Prize. You were known in Benedictine circles even before that as your two brothers are Benedictine Fathers as well, and you started your life as a monk in Pannonhalma. As far as I know, your monastic life began in 1942 but how did it continue abroad and what is the reason for having more than 20 books and 60 studies published abroad before having your first one in Hungary?

Father Jaki: The Benedictine Order sent me to Rome in 1947 to finish my theology studies so that I could teach theology in Pannonhalma – to teach theology! but by the time I had received my PhD at the end of 1950 the Order suggested me going to the USA. I was invited to the Saint Vincent Archabbey to teach theology at their faculty of theology and I taught theology and dogmatics there for three years until I lost my voice for 10 years at the end of the third year as a consequence of an operation. Later I saw that it was the Divine Providence working then. That is how I started to deal with sciences then with the history of science but I always considered the interests and aspects of theology. When I had to give up teaching theology, or rather a year before, I realized that the issues of theology and science can only be analyzed if you have a PhD both in theology and in any of the sciences and I chose physics. At Saint Vincent I took up advanced courses in mathematics in order to have my Hungarian academic results accepted easily. In 1960 I went to Princeton as an assistant professor and as I became aware of the fact that I would not be able to teach any more because of my [vocal] chords, I started to think what I would do in my life. I realized that writing books is much more pleasant than digging ditches. So I began to concentrate on writing a book but the most important factor of it is to be seized by an interesting subject. I clearly remember standing on the stairs of the Princeton post office in the autumn of 1962 when the idea of my first book on the history and philosophy of physics hit my mind. This book of 600 pages was published by the University of Chicago Press at the end of 1966. My problem was what NOT to include in the book, as if a book has already 600 pages it is very difficult to convince publishers that you want to add one more chapter to it. The title of this book is The Relevance of Physics where I cover the relationship of physics and biology, physics and ethics, physics and metaphysics and physics and theology, but I also wanted to add a chapter on the relationship of physics and psychology. The publishers did not accept it, therefore, a year later I started to write a book on the relationship of physics and psychology that lead me to the issue of artificial brain, so the original one chapter grew into five and this book was published with the title of Brain, Mind and Computers. Three months later it was awarded the Pierre Lecomte du Nouy Prize.

Interviewer: Yes, and this prize has a special character and aspect that is why it was given to your book. Who is this prize named after?

Father Jaki: It is named after a famous French biologist, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, a typical Frenchman given Catholic education, but during his university years he left his faith and became a first class biologist working at the Rockefeller University in the 1920s and elaborated a new experiment to define the Avogadro number. In the 1930s he started to have doubts about agnosticism and materialism and during the 2nd World War he returned to faith. After the 2nd World War he started to visit the American universities to tell the story of his mental odyssey and as in those days public opinion was strongly turned towards Christianity, and in the postwar years people felt that life was uncertain, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy had an enormous impact. His widow collected this fund to award authors illustrating Pierre Lecomte du Nouy’s mental conversion.

Interviewer: Let me ask you about your other prize because if someone is given the Templeton Prize by the Consort of the Queen of England [the Duke of Edinbrugh], then it must be another kind of prize awarding other issues.

Father Jaki: Talking about the Templeton Prize first I have to say something trivial. It is the biggest award in the world as far as money is concerned. Now nearly 1 million dollars are given with it. I remember that in 1968, on 1st January 1968 [Father Jaki probably means 1988, as he won in 1987] one of the New York dailies gave a questionnaire to its readers and the most successful answer was awarded with 1000 dollars, and one of the ten questions was that who had received the biggest sum of money as a prize in the previous year: an actress, a scientist or a monk, and of course there was hardly anyone to guess that it was a monk being a scientist at the same time who had received that prize.

Interviewer: We know that the history of thinking is also your field. We learnt at school and elsewhere that science and Christian faith cannot be reconciled but you seem to claim the opposite in your books. Historically speaking when did this process start?

Father Jaki: Historically, this process began with the Renaissance, a conscious return to classical paganism in Western Europe. The structure of the society, however, did not allow attacking Christianity or Catholic faith openly, therefore the Renaissance pagan movement could not affect a large number of people. It was, in fact, the business or entertainment of the intelligentsia, a very dangerous entertainment as it resulted in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both Reformation and Counter-Reformation mean a certain recurrence to medieval Christianity. When the Reformation and Counter-Reformation lost their strength and impetus after the peace of Westphalia which meant the end of the wars of religion as everybody got tired of religions, it became obvious by 1700 that the so-called enlightened, the rationalists were in full buoyancy. The dictionary of the Encyclopedia was published as well as the dictionaries of philosophy, and by the middle of the century the French enlightenment was feeding not the enlightenment –as this is a misleading label- at a maximum speed, but the blindness towards the transcendent or conscious blindness. This is the point of enlightenment. Around 1800 they were almost so successful to claim that the end of Christianity was being witnessed and that the Papacy would die before our eyes.

Interviewer: Your books and lectures, Professor, tell us that you have not taken all problems of science and the relationship and coherence of faith and science, the desires of the human soul and other data only from books and from the history of science but from the living world around us. How did you see these problems reflecting in people?

Father Jaki: It is an interesting story. In fact, in my first writings you can hardly find any references to Christianity. First I tried to address the agnostics being agnostic in a good sense, that is, who are not really anti-religious. I tried to show them that the scientific method is extremely limited therefore it cannot contribute to the basic questions of human life, ethics and values. Later, I found the time to deal with a great French physicist, historian and philosopher of science called Pierre Duhem who was born in 1861 and died in 1916 and wrote 30 books and 300 enormous theoretical and physical treaties. He is considered to be the greatest French Catholic genius at the turn of the 20th century. I realized why the universities in the world did not want to acknowledge and his genius. The reason for it is that unwillingly Pierre Duhem discovered that Newtonian physics is rooted in the 14th century, in the Catholic Sorbonne. For an agnostic or materialist scientist or ideologist that discovery may seem like a red scarf for a bull. Although our agnostic fellows and academic circles are willing to admit that Catholicism has certain values, for example Gregorian music, beautiful Gothic-style buildings, organized economic and social structure, they will never admit that the Catholic Church has anything relevant to do with creating science, no matter the quantity of evidence presented.

Interviewer: In recent years you have been to Hungary several times. You have had the chance to compare our society to the societies in Western Europe and in the USA. Our society, mainly our youth was greatly influenced by Marxism and materialism in the past 40 years. That is why I am asking your opinion about Hungarian people’s attitude towards ideological problems.

Father Jaki: I left Hungary in 1947 and I returned first in 1964. I witnessed a gloomy and desperate financial situation, but spiritually it was not so. I am not a specialist of Hungary, and I met only a limited number of people, but they were certainly strong spiritually. From the early 1970s I saw materialism rising, not dialectical materialism but materialism from the West. That materialism coming from the West threatened the faith more than the terror of dialectical materialism. From the 1950s on modern technology caused the spreading of materialism in a way that is unique in world history and in modern history as well. This is the real problem discussed by Pope Paul VI and the same problem seems to be staying with us now and it will be more so in the coming decades. Western European societies together with the USA fell victim of this problem and the same will happen to the societies of Central and Eastern Europe as well as that of Japan. The explanation is simply theological, it is the explanation of the original sin: you can see what is good but you do not do it, you can see that there should be limits but you disregard them, it has been going on so in our whole history and it will go on the same way until the end of the world.

Interviewer: Your books being rich in subject matters cover a great number of questions regarding science and religion. How would you summarize the essence of your books?

Father Jaki: My point is to try and show Christians of this technological and pragmatic world that the technological and scientific method is absolutely inadequate to discuss basic human questions, and is even less adequate to solve them. Technology, science and economy will never cease existential restlessness in people. It is the same restlessness about which Saint Augustine wrote: 'Our heart is restless until it rests in You.’ In points 34 and 35 of Gaudium et Spes there are about 5 lines saying that progress has not been able to fulfil its promises yet. Then 3 other important lines follow in which the Vatican Synod [Council] says in Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) that there is a desperate fight between Christ and the world, a mortal combat that will go on until the end of the world. If this is the real character of world history then it is clear why in the past 30 years theology, religious education, Catholic newspapers talked so little about this cruel fight. Now as I am getting older approaching 70 I deducted that the most realistic description of this situation is that we live in a rock garden. Not in a beautiful and plain meadow where you can sort out everything liberally with fantastic technical solutions, but we are in a rock garden where among the many rocks you can also find many small fertile patches. God entrusts us either personally or bodily with a diocese or the Church is entrusted with a relatively small area to work on, to grow fruit, but you should not have any illusions that rocks can be ground to fertile land. These rocks mean the continuous opposition of the world. If we accept that this is true, and it is the real character of the world, then we will be able to do our best with a peaceful mind. In this case, we will not be victims of illusion of which I could tell a lot of stories. Young priests, young theologians, young Catholic philosophers start their lives and carriers with great hope and huge perspectives, and if the Divine Providence is with them then they will lose hope in the human sense in ten years and became realists. Then they could start their real work.

Bishop Laffitte on a correct interpretation of the theology of the body

2011-08-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Link: Bishop Jean Laffitte warns against overemphasizing sexual aspects of Theology of Human Love

UPDATE: LONGER INTERVIEW HERE

Bishop Jean Laffitte, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family

Denver, Colo., Aug 11, 2011 / 05:05 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Jean Laffitte warned against focusing too intently on the sexual aspect of Blessed John Paul II's Theology of Human Love, which he says runs the risk of eliminating the depth and “mystery” involved in human and divine love.

In an Aug. 3 interview, Bishop Laffitte weighed in on the current debate on how best to interpret the late pontiff's teachings, saying it is essential to first understand God's design in creating man and woman.

Pope John Paul II's teachings on human love and sexuality – a collection of five years’ worth of his Wednesday audiences from 1979 to 1984 – is widely seen as unprecedented in the history of the Church.

Sexuality and the Body

Bishop Laffitte said that although it's normal to be attracted to “the beauty of sexuality and the beauty of the human body,” he doesn't agree with emphasizing “the sexual phenomenon” without giving the whole perspective of “the mystery of creation, and the mystery of God's calling on human love,” as taught by Pope John Paul II.

Bishop Laffitte recalled that when God created Adam and Eve from nothing, he could have used the same method to create every other person in human history. Yet instead, God enabled man and woman through their sexuality to participate in creating human life themselves.

“The Creator wanted the human being to be His own mediator in the action of creation – that's extraordinary,” he noted. “From that moment, in His providential intention, the man and woman He created would be the mediators through which He would continue to give life.”

“That's the mystery of sexuality,” he said, “the expression of divine and human love, which is integrated and interpenetrated.”

“It's impossible,” then, the bishop added, “to isolate sexuality” from this integration and “to isolate the body from this mystery,” since this would ultimately “isolate the creature from the Creator.”

Bishop Laffitte said that the mystery of sex encompasses “not only the unity of the bodies” but a unity of bodies “which are animated by God and which express a spiritual love.”

“When Pope John Paul II talks about the body we have to understand this,” he said.

The pontifical secretary also said that the term “Theology of the Body” is in fact an English translation of what is originally called “The Catecheses on Human Love.”

Although the English term is “not incorrect,” he said, it doesn't necessarily portray “the entirety of the Catecheses.”

The Theology of the Body “is not a wrong expression, on the condition that we see the intention of John Paul II,” Bishop Laffitte said.

“He was talking about human love and not only the partial focus we could have only on the body and on sexuality – which is ultimately a bodily expression of love.”

“Certainly the body has a theological dimension, but this dimension is given by God's design on human love and what, in the nature of man and woman, belongs to the fulfillment of the design.”

Teaching Sexuality in the Modern World

Although Bishop Laffitte praised the intent behind popularizing John Paul II's teachings on human sexuality, he underscored the “risk” of transmitting a narrowed vision of them. He stressed that in today's world, human love and sexuality have been “disfigured,” and Church teachings on the subject need to be spread as a means of evangelization, accessible to all people.

In response to those who say the philosophical and anthropological topics involved in the late Pope’s teachings are too complex for the average person, Bishop Laffitte said he believes anyone “of good faith can always be sensitive to mystery.”

“Even when a person cannot read and write, when he falls in love with someone he enters into an extraordinary mystery,” the bishop said.

Regardless of a person’s level of intellectual knowledge, he “has the same experience” when he falls in love as even the most educated person.

Bishop Laffitte also cautioned against taking a casual or “vulgar” approach to discussing human sexuality in the context of Church teachings.

“Man and woman have sinned,” he explained, “and in our bodies we bear the consequences of this wound in our nature.”

He said it's ultimately “unrealistic” to think that we can discuss or treat the issue of human sexuality in a casual or indifferent way, or ignoring the reality of sin.

“There is a dignity” and a “respectful expression of love and design” needed, Bishop Laffitte emphasized.

The best argument against euthanasia

2011-08-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

These two Sisters came to Rome at few years ago on a very, very rare pilgrimage, as the community takes its vow of poverty very, very seriously. Not the kind to be jet-setting all over the world. Here they are (just above) visiting the lovely Santa Sabina, the headquarters of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans.

I've known them, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, since 1986 when one of my closest friends joined the community. The Sisters are intelligent, fun and prayerful. They do only one thing: out of love for God, they take care of terminally ill cancer patients for free. They do not accept any insurance or any funding from national, state or local sources, nor do they accept money from patients or patients' families.

They were founded to serve the poor, but have never imposed a means test on the people they admit. The Sisters are all nurses (well, nearly all of them). They are specialists, indeed geniuses, in palliative care. People of all different backgrounds come to them, and people of all faiths and no faith. Yet to the best that any of the Sisters can recall (and some of them are very old, with lengthy institutional memories) no one, not one single person, in their care at any time in the last 100 years has asked to be euthanized.

Yes, my Sister friend has said she has had a few patients over the years who were suffering greatly and expressed the wish that they could die, but they have never actually asked for something so that they could be "put out of their misery." Not one of them has. Including the patients who are atheists, or who might be suffering from severe depression and its attendant thoughts of suicide.

Why?

There's not much of an answer. Even my friend the Sister said: "What we do is very simple." The patients are very well cared for, their pain is managed as well as it can be, the Sisters do all of the nursing, and even in the middle of the night there is always at least one Sister on the floor. I know their hospitals or homes well -- they are peaceful and clean and bright. Mass and the daily round of prayers are broadcast throughout the buildings. Naturally, the Sisters live just upstairs.

Think about it: no one has asked to be euthanized. Not once in a hundred years.

Sir John Everett Millais

2011-08-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

Vale of rest, 1859

The limits of the scientific method

2011-08-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Reconocer los límites del método científico, herencia del padre Jaki

PDF version

Celebrado un curso de verano sobre el sacerdote y físico fallecido en 2009

La importancia de reconocer los límites del método científico, que impide a la ciencia experimental tratar realidades no cuantificables, ha sido expuesta como una de las principales aportaciones del sacerdote y físico Stanley Jaki.

Destacados especialistas abordaron el tema Ciencia y fe en Stanley Jaki, en un curso de verano del 11 el 13 de julio en el Colegio Mayor San Pablo CEU de Madrid, ciudad donde el sacerdote y físico húngaro falleció hace dos años.

Los ponentes pusieron de relieve, como aspectos más sobresalientes del pensamiento de Jaki, los límites del método científico, la distinción entre ciencia experimental y saber humanístico, y la importancia de distinguir sin oponer ciencia y fe, informó a ZENIT uno de los coordinadores del curso, el profesor de la Universidad San Pablo CEU Leopoldo Prieto.

Intervinieron, entre otros, el matemático y profesor de Filosofía de la ciencia de la Universidad de La Sorbonne Jacques Vauthier, el físico y filósofo de la Universidad de Comillas Manuel María Carreira y el profesor del Ateneo Regina Apotolorum Paul Haffner.

Las instituciones organizadoras del Congreso fueron la Universidad CEU San Pablo (Madrid) y el Ateneo pontificio Regina Apostolorum (Roma).

Cuestión metodológica

Todos coincidieron en que Stanley Jaki, en su obra, se preocupó por poner al descubierto los límites del método científico, intentando continuamente deslindar el objeto de la ciencia y el objeto de la religión.

En una entrevista realizada en 1991, Jaki hacía suyas las palabras de Maxwell: “Una de las pruebas más difíciles para una mente científica es conocer los límites del método científico”.

A la obligada pregunta de cuáles son estos límites, Jaki respondía: “Los límites de la ciencia (y al hablar de ciencia me refiero aquí a la física) los fija su propio método”.

“El método de la física versa sobre los aspectos cuantitativos de las cosas en movimiento –continuaba-. Sólo podemos aplicar legítimamente el método científico-experimental cuando captamos rasgos cuantitativos en las cosas”.

“Pero cuando ante las cosas nos surgen preguntas como ¿es esto bello?, o ¿existe esto?, o ¿es moralmente buena esta acción?, nos preguntamos cosas que la ciencia no puede responder”, añadía.

Según los ponentes del congreso, ésta es una idea fundamental y “muy sana” de los límites del método científico en la que hay unanimidad en la epistemología actual, no sólo entre los catolicos.

Ciencias y humanidades

Precisamente en razón de los límites del método científico, el científico y sacerdote húngaro señaló que la ciencia experimental no está capacitada para tratar realidades que no son cuantificables o medibles, y pertenecen al saber humanístico.

Acerca de la distinción entre saber humanístico y ciencia experimental, Jaki afirmaba: “Los estudios humanísticos y los científicos deben estar separados. No se debe intentar fundirlos porque parten de presupuestos distintos y emplean métodos también distintos”.

“En humanidades, por ejemplo, cuando estudiamos a Dante, no preguntamos: ¿cuántas letras hay en tal o cual obra de Dante?, pregunta que en el campo científico sería lógica”, señalaba el sacerdote científico.

Jaki indicó que “debemos cultivar tanto los aspectos cuantitativos de las cosas como aquellos que no son mensurables”.

Contra el cientifismo

Los ponentes también destacaron que el padre Jaki denunció el cientifismo como un enfoque de la ciencia que no reconoce los límites de su propio método.

El Diccionario de la Real Academia Española presenta dos acepciones de cientificismo. La primera pone de manifiesto sobre todo el aspecto metodológico del cientificismo, definiéndolo como la “doctrina según la cual los métodos científicos deben extenderse a todos los dominios de la vida intelectual y moral sin excepción”.

La segunda acepción de cientificismo se centra en su aspecto de contenido, definiéndolo como la “teoría según la cual los únicos conocimientos válidos son los que se adquieren mediante las ciencias positivas”.

Jaki llegó a afirmar que el gran crimen de este siglo es decir que el único verdadero conocimiento es aquel que pertenece al campo de lo misurable cuantitativamente.

Preguntado por las consecuencias más relevantes, el sacerdote húngaro respondía: “Es un crimen en el sentido de que estas aplicaciones unilaterales del método cuantitativo llegan a privar al ser humano de su comprensión de los aspectos inconmensurables de la existencia”

Según Jaki, “la principal consecuencia es la relativización de los puntos de vista morales”.

“En lugar de movernos en una perspectiva moral, según la cual una acción es intrínsecamente buena y otra es intrínsecamente mala, ahora seguimos un modelo behaviorista”, explicaba.

Para el científico húngaro, “esta es la base del relativismo moderno que se fundamenta en la creencia de que existen varios patrones de comportamiento, o, como dice la popular frase americana, existen “estilos de vida alternativos”. Después no se hacen más preguntas”.

Complementariedad

En este sentido, el coordinador del curso, Leopoldo Prieto afirmó que “asistimos a una nueva oleada de presiones de una pretendida ciencia biológica militante atea”.

“Frente a un dogma clásico del cientifismo, que afirma que ciencia y fe son incompatibles, el padre Jaki reitera una doctrina clásica de la Iglesia –explicó Prieto-: sí hay una distinción de métodos entre ellas, pero ninguna oposición, sino perfecta complementariedad”.

Para el padre Jaki, ciencia y fe son dos modos de acercamiento, ambos racionales, con métodos distintos.

En opinión de Prieto, bajo la pretendida oposición entre ciencia y fe “quien vive una religión lo hace a expensas de una carencia de racionalidad; se condena a un estatuto inferior a aquella persona que cree en Dios y asume la verdad de lo que la Iglesia propone”.

Además, se cae en el materialismo, promotor de cuestiones como el aborto y la eutanasia.

En su intervención, el profesor de la Universidad de Leeds John Beaumont destacó que el padre Jaki siempre se movió por la convicción de que “la ciencia y la religión apuntan hacia Dios, pero lo hacen por caminos distintos”.

Una idea central del pensamiento de Jaki expuesta por Beaumont se refiere a que la ciencia empírica no conduce necesariamente al descreimiento de las realidades inmateriales que escapan de su enfoque.

Por ello, el sacerdote y físico húngaro manifestó que incluso si uno acepta los principios del darwinismo, la persona sigue siendo algo distinto.

Por eso, destacó el ponente, las tesis darwinistas no suponían para Jaki ningún problema sino hasta el momento en que se convierte en ideología.

Sacerdote y científico

Stanley Jaki nació en 1924 en Győr (Hungría). Sacerdote benedictino, fue profesor de Historia y Filosofía de la ciencia en la Universidad Seton Hall de South Orange (Nueva Jersey).

En 1950 obtuvo la licenciatura en Teología sistemática en el Ateneo Pontificio Anselmianum (Roma). Siete años después, obtuvo el doctorado en Física en la Fordham University (Nueva York).

Se especializó en historia y filosofía de la ciencia. Escribió más de cincuenta libros y más de 400 artículos.

Recibió los premios Lecomte du Nouy en 1970 y Templeton en 1987, así como siete doctorados honoris causa.

Era miembro honorario de la Academia Pontificia de las Ciencias y de la History of Science Society, así como miembro correspondiente de la Academia Nacional de las Ciencias, Bellas Artes y Artes de Burdeos.

Durante los años 1974-1976 impartió en Edimburgo dos ciclos de las prestigiosas Gifford Lectures y en 1977 fue Fremantle Lecturer en el Balliol College de Oxford.

Durante casi 50 años el P. Stanley Jaki ofreció conferencias en las más prestigiosas universidades americanas y europeas.

Jaki ha contribuido con sus estudios históricos, ante todo, a la clarificación del origen cristiano de la ciencia moderna, en continuidad con lo que habían sostenido precedentemente otros historiadores de la ciencia como Alasdair Crombie, Edward Grant, Herbert Butterfield, Alexander Koyré y Reijer Hooykaas.

No descuidó el estudio de importantes cuestiones científico-epistemológicas, ni la apologética.

El 7 de abril de 2009, después de un ciclo de conferencias impartidas en Roma, murió en Madrid, a la edad de 85 años, el padre Stanley Jaki, monje benedictino, físico, filósofo y teólogo.

vía ZENIT – Reconocer los límites del método científico, herencia del padre Jaki.

Monday, August 8th

2011-08-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

Monday: Maronites!

2011-08-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

On Facebook

Pushkin: The Interview

2011-07-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON PUSHKIN'S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, INCLUDING DETAILS OF HIS MEETING WITH THE HOLY FATHER!

"The interview covers a wide range of topics including Pushkin's kittenhood, hobbies, how he became the cat in residence at the Birmingham Oratory, the role and the daily routine of an Oratory Cat, memories of his audience with the Pope, his liturgical preferences and his assessment of the impact of Summorum Pontificum, the origin of his name, his literary tastes, his favourite Saint, Cardinal Newman on cats, and cats who have inspired him."

Apostle to the Apostles

2011-07-22T15:26:00.001-07:00

A heart at rest at Pannonhalma

2011-07-17T13:11:00.001-07:00

St. John Nepomucene, pray for us

2011-07-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

Wanted: one Leaky Cauldron

2011-07-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

84 years a Cistercian

2011-07-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

July 5, 1981

2011-07-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

...ἐξαγγείλητε τοῦ ἐκ σκότους ὑμᾶς καλέσαντος εἰς τὸ θαυμαστὸν αὐτοῦ φῶς.

photo from the stunning North Atlantic Skyline, Dispatches from the West of Ireland

The end of an era

2011-07-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Archduke Otto von Habsburg

Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, began his public life as the infant Crown Prince of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ended it as Father of the multinational European Parliament.

Otto von Habsburg with a bust of himself at Paks, Hungary, in 2005 Photo: REX

2:23PM BST 04 Jul 2011

Within that neatly closed circle lay all the major political dramas of the 20th century, most of which he witnessed and some of which he influenced. He was centre stage for one of them — the unequal struggle against Hitler for the survival of his Austrian homeland, which he tried to conduct as an exiled Pretender in the 1930s. Not for nothing did the Führer call the triumphant march-in of March 12 1938 “Operation Otto”.

All that seemed unimaginable to the world in which young Otto, as he was known, started life during the deceptively tranquil Indian summer of the 650-year-old Habsburg monarchy. He was born third in line to the throne on November 12 1912 in the small Vienna palace of Hetzendorf and christened with a string of names demonstrating that the blood of all the Roman Catholic royal families of Europe flowed in his veins: Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius.

His father, the Archduke Karl, was a great-nephew of the ruling Emperor Franz Josef, and was then serving as an infantry major-commander at the regimental barracks in the capital. His mother was the former Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, and their marriage the year before had been that rare event in a dynasty plagued with so many matrimonial mishaps and misalliances — a happy union of two people perfectly matched in attractiveness, temperament and lineage. Their firstborn was to follow the prescription almost to the letter in his own marriage 38 years later.

At the time of his birth, the 11-nation monarchy still seemed safe, if somewhat wobbly, and his own time at its helm still fairly distant. One Viennese newspaper hailed the newborn prince as the future monarch who “according to the human calculations, will be called upon to steer the future of Europe in the last quarter of the 20th century”.

The assassination at Sarajevo on June 28 1914 of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, alongside his morganatic wife, put a brusque end to all such calculations. Indeed, the First World War which broke out six weeks later was to spell the doom of Europe’s continental empires, that of the Habsburgs included.

Half way through the war, in the early hours of November 22 1916, the old emperor Franz Josef, who had ruled for a record-breaking 68 years, died at last.

An era, as well as a reign, was over, but the succession was smooth. Otto’s father automatically became the new emperor, and he, aged four, the new Crown Prince. His first ceremonial appearance came on November 30 1916 when he walked, a tiny figure in a white fur-trimmed tunic, between his parents behind the hearse of the late ruler at the great funeral procession in the capital.

A month later he was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the monarchy’s Magyar subjects when his father was crowned in Budapest as the new King of Hungary. The official photograph shows the young boy, dressed in ermine and velvet with a great white feather in his cap, sitting between his parents in their ornate coronation robes.

He always retained vague memories of those events, but these became much sharper when, two years later, the monarchy collapsed under the combined pressure of domestic upheaval and defeat on the battlefield.

The beginning of November 1918 saw him and his siblings stranded in a royal shooting lodge near Budapest, where an armed revolution had broken out. They were rescued by one of their Bourbon uncles, Prince René, who smuggled them across the border to rejoin their parents in the Schonbrunn Palace of Vienna. Otto had a child’s eye view of the collapse of the monarchy, abandoned by the aristocracy it had created.

On November 11 1918 the Emperor Karl, though not formally abdicating, “renounced participation in the affairs of state”. That same night they fled the deserted palace, heading at first for Eckartsau, their privately owned shooting lodge 40 miles north-east of the capital.

The winter there passed fairly calmly, but by the spring their tiny self-styled “court” was under threat from Left-wing agitators. (Austria had promptly declared itself a Republic after their flight from Vienna.)

Their rescuer now was not a family member but a British Army officer — Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Strutt, dispatched on the personal authority of King George V with orders to escort the beleaguered Austrian emperor and his family to safety. This Strutt accomplished in some style, reassembling their royal train for the journey into Switzerland on March 25 1919. Otto never forgot the experience. Whenever he heard in later life complaints about British indifference to the Habsburgs’ fate he would reply: “Yes, but there was always Strutt.”

The two and a half years of their Swiss exile were marked by the two attempts of the ex-Emperor to regain his Hungarian crown. Both were blocked in Budapest by Miklos Horthy, who had now ensconced himself in power as Regent. After the ignominious failure of the second restoration bid the family were exiled by the allied powers to Madeira, where Karl died, a broken man, on April 1 1922. That same day the nine-year-old Otto heard himself addressed as “Your Majesty” by the tiny household-in-exile. To the end of his days he remembered the shock it gave him: “Now it was my turn.”

Under the protection of their kinsman, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the family moved to Lequeitio on the Spanish Basque coast. Otto remembered the seven years they spent there as their most tranquil time of exile. They were also, for him, the most hardworking. Under the strict supervision of his mother he took, under various tutors, the Matura (roughly, English A-levels) in both German and Hungarian. His further education was also the motive for their next move — to the gloomy castle of Hams at Steenokkerzeel, in Belgium, so that Otto could take his degree at the nearby university of Louvain. It was at Hams that Otto reached his 18th birthday and was duly declared, in a family ceremony with few outside guests, “in his own right sovereign and head of the house”.

However ghostly that title appeared, it was enough to impress the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who was manoeuvring to seize power in Germany. When in the winter of 1931-32 the young Pretender spent a few months studying in Berlin Hitler twice suggested a meeting.

The first invitation came from Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the dim-witted Nazi son of the exiled Kaiser, and the second via Goering himself. Otto refused both times on the spurious excuse that he had not come to Berlin to discuss politics (in fact, he was doing nothing but). Hitler was incensed by the snub and it touched off a six-year battle between the two men for the fate of their Austrian homeland.

The climax was reached in February and March of 1938 when a Nazi takeover in Vienna seemed imminent, prompting a short-lived show of defiance from the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg — a monarchist at heart but without the strength of his convictions. His vacillation prompted a remarkably courageous offer from the young Pretender to return from exile to take over the reins of government in order to repel Hitler. Schuschnigg dithered but eventually rejected the idea — perhaps just as well for Otto, who was already high on the Gestapo’s wanted list.

He had moved close to the top of that list by the time, two years after the Anschluss, that German armies swept into France and Belgium. The exiled Habsburgs got away from Hams only a few hours before Goering’s bombers attacked the castle, and then they joined the vast stream of refugees heading south. They eventually reached Lisbon, where they were still being hounded by the Gestapo. President Roosevelt (whom Otto had met in Washington just before the fall of France) then honoured his offer of “hospitality in an emergency” and they were all flown by Clipper seaplane to the United States.

As Otto von Habsburg later admitted, he wasted far too much energy during those wartime years in America on the faction-fighting among Austrian refugee groups instead of concentrating on the broader political picture. But, thanks largely to his personal ties with the President, he was able to repair the image of Austria so tarnished by its supine surrender to Hitler in the Anschluss. And, in the last months of the war, he worked closely with the White House in the vain attempt to lure Horthyite Hungary over to the Allied side.

Churchill, whom he met at the Quebec Conference, warmly supported the vision of a post-war conservative federation in Central Europe. Stalin put paid to those visions, however, and it was to a Communist-controlled Danube Basin that Otto returned in the spring of 1945.

He made a brief foray into Western Austria but was expelled by the reborn Austrian Republic, which had reaffirmed the anti-Habsburg legislation of 1919. He then faced a personal crisis — without a valid passport, a home or any regular income. He solved the last problem by embarking on a career as a journalist and public lecturer. This was exhausting but highly remunerative and, within five years, he had paid off all his wartime debts and was enjoying a comfortable income.

He could now think of finding a home and founding a family. The ideal partner appeared by chance in 1950, when he visited a refugee centre near Munich. Working there as a nurse was Princess Regina of Sachsen-Meiningen, herself a refugee whose father, Duke George III, had died in a Soviet concentration camp. The ideally-matched couple were married a year later and settled in a comfortable villa at Pocking, near Lake Starnberg in Bavaria. Their first five children were all girls, and it was not until 1961 that the birth of Karl Thomas, the first of two sons, assured the line of direct succession.

This prompted Otto to renounce his own dynastic claims and pursue what had long fascinated him, a full-time career in politics. He acquired dual German-Austrian nationality, and in 1979 was elected to the European Parliament as Christian Democrat member for North Bavaria. There he stayed for the next 20 years, becoming the highly regarded Father of the House and its only member to have been born before the First World War.

He proved an accomplished debater with a fluent command of seven European languages. Though he spoke on a variety of topics, his abiding theme was the need to bridge the East-West division of the continent and ultimately to bring all the nations of the old monarchy within the new European Union. He continued to work successfully at this even after his retirement, using the pan-European movement as his principal platform. He had been the president ever since the death of its founder, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, in 1972.

On October 3 2004, Pope John Paul II beatified Otto’s father, Emperor Karl. It was an important event in Otto von Habsburg’s life, and one that perhaps softened the blow that had occurred five years earlier.

He had hoped that his son Karl would carry on the Habsburg name in the European Parliament, but in 1999 the young archduke — who had been sitting alongside his famous father as a Right-wing member for Western Austria — was dropped by his party after a controversy over the financing of his campaign funds. A subsequent attempt to launch Karl on to the Austrian domestic political scene proved a dire, if gallant, failure.

Otto von Habsburg’s wife, the Archduchess Regina, died in February 2010.

Source

O lux beata Trinitas

2011-06-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

O LUX beata Trinitas, et principalis Unitas, iam sol recedit igneus, infunde lumen cordibus.
Te mane laudum carmine, te deprecemur vespere: te nostra supplex gloria per cuncta laudet saecula.
Deo Patri sit gloria, eiusque soli Filio, cum Spiritu Paraclito, et nunc, et in perpetuum.

AD MULTOS ANNOS

2011-06-09T06:32:00.001-07:00

On the occasion of 60 years of priesthood, a spiritual bouquet for the pope

June 9, 2011

Cardinal Piacenza, with the Holy Father in the background

"I haven’t read much about yet, but on thewebsite of the Archdiocese of Utrecht I read that Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, has written a letter to all the world’s ordinaries of dioceses and other ecclesiastical jurisdictions. In it, the cardinal asks them to provide for 60 hours of Eucharistic Adoration in their diocese, for the occasion for the 60th anniversary of the ordination to the priesthood of Pope Benedict XVI, “to demonstrate to him our gratitude, our affection, and our communion with him, both in his service to God and to the Church and above all in that “Truth which shines upon the world” to which he continually calls us through his teaching”.

The anniversary is on 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Do read the letter via the link above. There’s little need for me to repeat it here, after all.

The archdiocese has had a prayer composed for this reason, a prayer that is in the first place intended for use during Adoration, but may also be used at the end of Mass, other liturgical celebrations or in personal prayer. The original Dutch text is available here. Below is my translation."

Photo credit: AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito/original post at In Caelo et in Terra

Fr. Jaki course at CEU San Pablo, Madrid

2011-06-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

Science and Faith in Stanley Jaki
Coordinator: Lucía Guerra Menéndez
Date: 11 July - 14 July.
ECTS Credits: 1,5
Place: Campus Moncloa

Liturgical report: Italy (but it could be anywhere...)

2011-06-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Fr. Mark Daniel Kirby reports:

The Mass at San Giuliano Park

A model of what the Second Vatican Council intended was given at the Mass celebrated by the Holy Father on 8 May 2011 in San Giuliano Park on the occasion on his recent visit to Venice. To my edification and delight a schola cantorum sang the complete Proper of the Mass in Gregorian Chant, while the vast crowd of the faithful alternated the Paschaltide Ordinary (Mass I) Lux et Origo [WOW!] with the choir. The organizers of this celebratIon are to be commended and congratulated.

The Beatification Mass in Faicchio

[Click to go to original post] The Mass of Beatification of the Venerable Servant of God Mother Maria Serafina del Sacro Cuore on 28 May 2011 gave me a firsthand experience of what appears to be the norm in most of Italy. As Dom Samuel Weber, O.S.B. is fond of saying, "I'm just reporting."
The Proper of the Mass was completely ignored. The Introit, Offertory, and Communion were replaced by songs composed in the popular style. While these pieces were not entirely devoid of scriptural and theological content they were not "the Mass" itself. Consequently, the faithful were not singing the Mass; they were, rather, singing at Mass.

This, of course, deprives the faithful of the richness of the liturgy itself and, at the same time, deprives the celebrant of the very texts out of which the Church would have him preach the homily.

Low Mass With Hymns

The celebrant of the Mass of Beatification was His Eminence, Angelo Cardinal Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. His Eminence has a fine singing voice. He chose, nonetheless, to speak nearly all those parts of the Mass that, in so solemn and festive occasion, ought to be sung. To my dismay, HIs Eminence recited in a spoken tone of voice even the Preface of the Mass, the most lyrical and solemn element of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, one that, by its very nature cries out to be sung.

The end result was an anomaly: on this most festive occasion there was, in effect, nothing more than a Low Mass with a sung Ordinary (Mass VIII) De Angelis and with hymns. Very disappointing. [CASA'S NOTE TO ANY READERS: THERE ACTUALLY ARE OTHER MASSES BESIDES MASS VIII! AS THE NUMBER MIGHT INDICATE, THERE ARE SEVEN OTHERS BEFORE IT!! AND GUESS HOW MANY THERE ARE AFTER IT!!!]

Feast of San Marcellino in Piedimonte Matese

On the morning of 2 June 2011, it was again His Eminence, Angelo Cardinal Amato who celebrated a Pontifical Mass in the glorious baroque Church of San Marcellino in Piedimonte Matese.

A deacon, vested in a splendid red dalmatic and surrounded by a magnificent baroque decor read the Gospel in a spoken tone of voice that rendered it banal. The Gospel could have been, and should have been chanted.

Again, absolutely nothing of the Proper of the Mass was sung. The Ordinary was sung in Italian, using a rather sentimental popular setting of the Gloria with a refrain. The Creed was recited: very disappointing on an occasion when the sung Creed would have been marvelously expressive of the faith of the Church and of her martyrs through the ages.

Again, His Eminence recited in a spoken tone of voice all of the parts belong to the celebrant. This was acutely disappointing, given both his ability to sing, and the solemnity of the occasion. And again, the end result was a Low Mass with a sung Ordinary in Italian and popular hymns.

In the Local Parish

We Southern Italians love to sing, and sing we do! The faithful are deprived, nonetheless, of the authentic chants of the Church. Since my arrival here, not once have I heard the Proper of the Mass (even recited) nor anything even remotely related to it. [DEAR FATHER, DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH...]

The Ordinary of the Mass is trivialized by settings in Italian that are sentimental and that have no organic continuity with the musical tradition of the Church. Not once have I heard a priest sing the orations or the Preface of the Mass and this in a culture where to sing is to love, and to love is to sing.

Canon law conference in Wisconsin

2011-06-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

Cardinal Burke is giving two talks, one on the interaction of the Roman Rota and the Apostolic Signatura in the administration of ecclesiastical justice, and the other on the Signatura’s views on some recently proposed grounds for matrimonial nullity.

(more info here: http://canonlawblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/2011-canon-law-conference-is-set.html)

Venerable Cistercian Abbey in Rome to close

2011-05-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/05/pope-suppresses-abbey-of-santa-croce-in.html

A very sad turn of events, but perhaps, in God's own good time, a new community can resume monastic life there as well as take over guardianship of the holy relics.

Universae Ecclesiae: Pretiosum Thesaurum

2011-05-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

http://press.catholica.va/news_services/bulletin/news/27407.php?index=27407&lang=en#TRADUZIONE IN LINGUA INGLESE

A happy day in St. Louis

2011-05-06T16:31:00.001-07:00

photo courtesy of Jeff Geerling

That's right: it wasn't

2011-05-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Liturgy of the Church goes beyond this same "conciliar reform" (cf.Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1), whose purpose, in fact, was not mainly that of changing the rites and the texts, but rather that of renewing the mentality and placing, at the center of Christian life and of pastoral [activity], the celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Christ.Unfortunately, perhaps, even by us, Pastors and experts, the Liturgy was treated more as an object to be reformed than as a subject, capable of renewing Christian life, from the moment in which "there exists a very close and organic link between the renewal of the Liturgy and the renewal of all the life of the Church. ..."

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/05/it-wasnt.html

On "Catholic" blogs and bloggers

2011-05-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

From the current Code of Canon Law (1983):

Canon 216: Since they share the Church's mission, all Christ's faithful have the right to promote and support apostolic action, by their own initiative, undertaken according to their state and condition. No initiative, however, can lay claim to the title 'Catholic' without the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.

Rome bloggers' meeting

2011-05-01T20:16:00.001-07:00

Much has been said in the last week about Pope Blessed John Paul II and how he steadied the Church at a time when it seemed to be almost in free-fall, and how he turned the tide to the best of his ability, and kept us from going the way of, say, the Anglican Communion.

Similarly, at least to a certain extent, I credit the Internet and the personal blogs of some Catholics with the resurgence of liturgical tradition, since it helped like-minded people to find each other, as well as fostering a sense of the need to continue to reinforce authentic Catholic identity. Sure, there are blogs “on the other side” (like some of those associated with National Catholic Reporter – though not John Allen, of course) which complain loudly about the new Beato and his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, as having undermined what they think the last Ecumenical Council was supposed to do and what was supposed to happen as a result of it. I’ve not done a headcount, but this latter sort of blogger seems to be in a minority and the more “conservative” (a word I dislike intensely) bloggers seem to have a more notable online presence.

I think one of the reasons the Pontifical Council for Social Communications is hosting this Rome bloggers’ meeting is precisely because some such “Catholic blogs” might being doing more harm than good in some ways, in the sense of all the backbiting comments and name-calling of bishops, etc. I think there is a genuine concern on the part of some Vatican functionaries and bishops in various places (I’d guess mostly in the English-speaking world) that a fair number of bloggers who self-identify as Catholic, or whose blogs after a cursory read can lead one to believe they are Catholic, have very little formal education in Catholic theology or catechetics or associated disciplines and that there seems to be a certain level of misinformation and an inaccurate portrait of the Catholic Church being (perhaps unwittingly) spread by them. When bloggers have solid formation and training -- Fr. Z. and other learned priests come to mind -- I think the results can be good. When people who say they are Catholic rant and rave and use bad language on their blogs and perpetuate misunderstandings of doctrine or points of Church history or related matters, then I don't see what good they do.

The twin factors of not having adequate training (or permission to engage in such debates, since many give at least the appearance of “speaking for the Church" to some degree) plus the overall lack of accountability are major problems. Two additional problematical elements are those of advertising* and asking for donations from people one has never met (one's regular readers for the most part).

For me, the Catholic blogosphere has come to feel rather small over the last five or six years, and among the blogs I check in on there are several which belong to bloggers I've shared apartments with, traveled with, attended conferences with, studied with in Rome or elsewhere, those who are or were my fellow-parishioners, plus people who have helped me in many ways, plus those I have found jobs for or people I've worked for, or socialized with on a number of occasions, or who at the very least are friends of friends, etc. -- they make up, in short, a segment of the blogosphere inhabited by Catholics I know somewhat well. Below is a partial list of blogs (or websites which have blogs) for which I can claim some personal acquaintance with the authors or bloggers (several of whom below will be at the Rome bloggers' meeting):

Orbis Catholicus

Le Suisse Romain

New Liturgical Movement

Fr. Gabriel Burke

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Inside the Vatican

Catholic Online

The Hermeneutic of Continuity

Catholic News Agency

Madrid11 (World Youth Day site)

C-Fam

Atonement Online

Orwell’s Picnic

Rome Reports

The Chant Cafe

What I can tell you is this: while I am not necessarily referring to anyone on the list above, merely making an observation based upon my own experience with "Catholic bloggers" in general, few bloggers who are Catholic have any relevant qualifications to be blogging about Catholicism in the manner which they do. Indeed a fair number of bloggers who blog about Catholic matters appear to be chronically unemployed or underemployed and, assessing their overall writing ability, seem to have limited formal education or at least not much beyond the secondary level. According to their own blogs, several of the US bloggers invited to Rome lacked passports and/or enough money for a round trip airline ticket. Most of all, a not insignificant number of them would appear to have a great deal of time on their hands, or seem to want to make a "career" out of blogging about Church affairs. Some have an incomplete grasp on their own faith at best: one need only recall the unfortunate example of Gerald Augustinus and what was once a very popular “Catholic blog.”

A friend of several worthy Irish bloggers told me I was being "judgmental" by pointing this out (which in itself I found somewhat judgmental!). But persons who put themselves and their opinions and (perhaps the proverbial too much) information about their circumstances out there in the blogosphere have to expect occasional remarks or criticism, some positive and some negative.

Yes, on rare occasions, I too chime in. I started this blog four years ago to let friends know I was still alive, since due to my travels and spending my time shuttling back and forth from Italy and France to various places in the United States, even those closest to me sometimes wondered where I might be and if I was all right. I like to share some of my photos and good news, along with articles I find interesting and things to mark the change of liturgical season and the like. Otherwise, I try to confine myself to areas where I can claim at least some verifiable expertise. I do not feel it is appropriate to comment upon many events or every event in the Church, especially if something happens which I perceive as negative, much less on political matters in various places in the world. I know some history (lifelong study plus a bachelor's degree) and a fair amount of canon law (again, a great deal of personal study plus a Licentiate in canon law from a pontifical university in Rome, and now doctoral studies at Louvain), and I try to stick to those things.

However, I also have a great love for traditional liturgical forms, and after belonging for five years as a most active member (and volunteer sacristan) to a parish in Rome which celebrated the classical Roman Rite, in addition to have been a research assistant to one of the world's finest liturgy scholars, and having studied liturgical law along with canon law, I feel I have some modest competence to make the odd comment here and there on liturgical matters, from the perspective of an ordinary member of the laity in the pews. Additionally, thanks to having been a research assistant to"one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers" I also feel I can make the occasional observation on faith and science issues.

What I hope the bloggers hear at the Rome meeting is that they should remember they are Catholic and to conduct themselves accordingly online. I also hope that they will be encouraged to seek out better training and more education regarding the matters they feel “called” to comment upon, and to be vigilant about the tone of their posts as well as their comboxes. I do not want to see censorship, but I would hope that bloggers would realize that there is the possibility that such blogs might be a non-believer’s first contact with the Catholic Church and with our faith and that dissention, complaints, rudeness, calling this person (or Cardinal!) or that university bad names online and in public are in no way helpful.

*Yes, I have an Amazon widget on my blog: I receive no benefit from having it there, and have only recently included it since I keep getting asked where some of the featured books can be found, especially the ones on liturgy and liturgical ceremonies and rubrics.

UPDATE: From CNS --

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

"The Catholic Church needs active members who blog, but Catholic bloggers also need the church, especially to remind them of the virtue of charity needed in their writing, said participants at a Vatican meeting."

And...

"But he [Fr. Lombardi] also said that the whole question of bloggers' self-centeredness and 'ego' is 'one of the problems which is worth reflecting on,' because while it is a danger for all communicators, a communicator who calls him- or herself Catholic must focus first on serving others."

100 years to recover from the aftermath of Vatican II

2011-04-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

From The Catholic Herald:

It will take 100 years to recover from the 1960s and 70s: but John Paul set us back on course.

Crucem sanctam subiit

2011-04-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

New book from Father Jaki

2011-04-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

"This book is a collection of papers given at various meetings of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, all held in its headquarters, the Casina Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens. The lectures deal with the relation of science and culture, with the nature of exact science as different from other branches of learning, and with evolution. Their basic thrust is to show that there is no conflict between a science and a religion (Catholicism in particular) that are aware of their respective limitations. The latter derive from the unique function of quantities versus the function of all other words. While the latter can operate with the phrase "more or less," the former cannot do so without undermining the very definition of numbers, of integers in particular. The general title should not suggest that the contents and claims of these essays reflect the position of the Vatican. They reflect conclusions which the author reached after pondering the relations of science and religion for half a century."

Available here.

(And a new lecture on Bl. John Henry Newman by Dr. Angelo Bottone!)

Gloria laus et honor Tibi sit

2011-04-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

From Maestro Tucker: Things that are NOT so

2011-04-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

A director of music at a Catholic parish, obviously of long experience, sent me a list he has been keeping of things that people believe that are not so:

1. It is possible to fully understand the Mass.
1a. Having Mass entirely in the vernacular facilitates this complete comprehension.
1b. The more Latin we use, the less we can comprehend the Mass, unless we know Latin.

2. Mass is really about the words.

3. We must determine the popular musical taste of young people and incorporate these styles into the Mass, or young people will eventually leave the church.
3a. Young people overwhelmingly prefer contemporary popular music in church.
3b. Likewise, young children are only capable of grasping music written specifically for them.
3c. Family Masses, primarily addressed to children, facilitate catechesis. Such Masses do not, however, demonstrate to adults that religion is primarily for children.

4. Hymns and songs are integral to the Mass. Mass with music, but with no hymns or songs, is unthinkable.

5. The main way to determine a hymn or song's suitability for Mass is to examine the text.
5a. Therefore, since all versions of the Mass Ordinary have the same approved text in English, any setting is inherently suitable for Mass.

6. Changing texts to prayers, readings and hymns can be helpful, or is at least harmless; people won't even notice, and would say something if they did.

7. Laypeople live essentially stable lives, and look to the church to be surprising and innovative, especially in the liturgy.

8. Most women prefer gender-neutral language when referring to God. The younger the woman, the more this is true. References to God as "he" or "Father" are scandalous or unintelligible to the non-religious.

More here.

Passiontide

2011-04-09T20:18:00.001-07:00

Photo from Defend Us In Battle

Dicendum quod

2011-03-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

The less you understand what something says, the more profound it seems.

From The Age:

'Another victim of Andy Sakai reportedly was Kerri Baker, a college freshman, who paid $50 for ''Beautiful Goddess'' in Japanese above her belly button. When she went into a noodle shop with a bare midriff, chortling sushi chefs explained her tattoo read, ''Insert General Tso's Chicken Here''. ''I don't even like General Tso's,'' Baker sobbed. ''I'm a vegetarian.''

'Why emblazon yourself with signs you can't read? Why wed in a lingo you don't speak? Why do things sound so good in another language? Why does gobbledegook like a Latin Mass or a Gregorian chant speak to a congregation with a resonance not even Shakespeare can match? Indeed, as we drift further and further from the linguistic idiom in which Shakespeare wrote, and each generation finds him murkier and murkier, might it be that he becomes a greater playwright still? H.L. Mencken, upon hearing a stump politician holding forth to a rapt crowd, said, ''Only let them hear the thunder and they'll take the rest on faith.''

'Who among us has not been to the opera and thrilled to the sound of a diva singing in Italian, knowing her fate and that of the world hung on every note? And who among us has not listened to that same stanza sung in English and been amazed to discover she's trilling a backstory involving her brother-in-law's pastry-chef's use of lard, and had the music ruined by this clarity?'

ADORATIO 2011 in Rome, June 20 to 24

2011-03-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.adoratio2011.com/

Parce Domine

2011-03-09T11:34:00.001-08:00

A first: the Holy Father to be interviewed on TV

2011-03-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

Teacher with Down Syndrome

2011-03-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

Looks like Fr. Ryan is letting it go

2011-03-05T16:27:00.000-08:00

A prominent Catholic pastor in Seattle is “letting go” of his campaign against a new Latinized translation of the church liturgy, but not his convictions in starting it.
“It is the people who will have the last word on the new missal once it is introduced,” Fr. Michael Ryan, pastor of St. James Cathedral, said in a Sunday morning homily.
Like I said:

So, if this was not on someone's radar before, as much as I want to give a sympathetic hearing to the person who may have been taken by surprise, all the more so if that person is upset for one reason or another by this development (and I include priests, who certainly should know better, like the cathedral rector you mention), I would ultimately say to let it go. Yes, let it go if it did not interest you before, or if it did not matter to you before, or if you never read about any of this before. Let it go. Let it remain the province of the people for whom this sort of thing does desperately matter. If it was not of burning interest to you previously, I don't see why it should be now. If you've been "sleepwalking" in the practice of your faith and this is some kind of wake up call, well, that's fine. Be more involved, yes, but realize that you are coming very late to the game and conduct yourself accordingly: you have a lot to learn, and whining will get you nowhere, just like in all other areas and aspects of adult life.

UPDATE, AUGUST 17: MOST CATHOLICS UNAWARE OF REVISIONS OF MASS TEXTS

Groot Begijnhof, Leuven

2011-03-01T17:28:00.000-08:00

Wood smoke in the air and a view that has not changed in centuries...

Link

Happy Feast Day!

2011-02-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.bridgebuilding.com/narr/lbsch.html

To wit

2011-02-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

The Semmelweis reflex

and its partner in crime

Confirmation bias

Canon law and coffee mugs

2011-02-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

In college I had a friend who was not a morning person. Once a week I had to go to her room in the dorms and try to wake her up for the one morning class she had on her schedule (not an elective, not something she could get out of). I tried every approach, but usually I would wind up ducking as she threw a shoe at the doorway. She always had a pile of stilettos right by her bed. This alone was somewhat suspect. But these were all but lethal when thrown, even by a half-asleep 5'1 teenager.

She had a coffee mug on her rat's nest of a desk which said:

'"NOT A MORNING PERSON" doesn't even begin to cover it...'

I seem to recall it had a cartoon of one of Booth's frazzled dogs on it, a blur of crazed eyes and drool.

The recent exchanges on some blogs run by (sigh...) Catholics the last few weeks on issues related to the clergy have made me think of this over and over again. As a postscript to what I posted below on January 18th, I now think a coffee mug should commemorate our present nadir:

'"A BLOG IS NOT A GOOD FORUM TO TACKLE CANONICAL ISSUES" doesn't even begin to cover it...'

I think it would make a useful coffee mug, if only as a reminder, and would no doubt be all the more popular in certain circles if it had a Booth-like cartoon of a crazed and drooling canonist.

Com boxers

2011-02-03T19:54:00.000-08:00

'“I went to Catholic school for _ years,” delivered in a tone intended to make you wonder why the speaker isn’t on the short list for a red hat.'

help help i'm being repressed

2011-02-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

On clerical continence

2011-01-18T17:57:00.000-08:00

I had not planned on posting anything on this subject, since this is not a good forum to tackle canonical issues, or any other serious issues, frankly, being a blog more of a personal not professional nature. But the exchanges on the topic of clerical continence in the blogopshere among Catholics in the last few days prompt me to offer my own remarks, all the more so since mine is the "other related thesis" mentioned in comment #9 here.

I am a canon lawyer who works in an archdiocese in the United States. I will not say more than that, as I do not want what I say to be seen as being part of my archdiocese's official position on this issue, since it would be for our Archbishop to offer any kind of statement or catechesis to the faithful of this archdiocese on the Church's celibacy discipline. My remarks are merely the product of my own years of research while a graduate student at one of Rome's pontifical universities, and then over the course of the last year or so as I have been assembling my doctoral dissertation.

On average about once a week or every other week I wind up having to explain clerical celibacy and the ancient continence discipline to one or more persons or a group of people. I began my research even before I went to Rome to study canon law, but during my five years there I realized that most of my classmates (young priests, deacons and seminarians from all over the world) had no idea why they were celibate or about to promise celibacy for life, and could not explain celibacy when challenged on it ("There were married priests in the early Church, so why can't priests get married now?" or similar questions for which they had no convincing answer).

The answer is one I've given many times: it was never the case that deacons or priests could get married, but that married men could become deacons or priests. Yes, there used to be married priests in the early Church, indeed there were married deacons, priests, bishops (such as St. Paulinus of Nola and his wife Therasia who together chose a life of abstinence after their only child died) and even popes (like Pope St. Felix III, by tradition the great-great grandfather of Pope St. Gregory the Great, and Pope Hadrian II, whose wife and daughter were abducted and murdered). However, what seems to have gotten lost along the way is that it never mattered whether these clerics were married or single at the time they were ordained to major orders (beginning with the diaconate, and for many centuries the subdiaconate) -- since married or single, those who were ordained to major orders had to take upon themselves sexual continence for the rest of their lives. Hence the necessity of the wife's consent. It was more than just the fact that her husband was embarking upon a new and demanding ministry that might make inroads on her time as well, but rather that it meant total continence for her too.

In the early Church it was not uncommon, in cities, for the deacon or priest to move into the bishop's house, with his wife remaining at home or, from the 4th century onward, joining a group of devout women (or a community of nuns in later centuries). In rural areas a priest would often still live with his wife under the same roof, but it was usually considered a bit of a scandal if they continued to have children (cf. Pope St. Leo the Great). In 325 A.D., the First Council of Nicaea, canon 3, gives a list of women who could live clerics: "This great Synod has stringently forbidden any bishop, presbyter, deacon, or any one of the clergy whatever, to have a subintroducta dwelling with him, except only a mother, or sister, or aunt, or such persons only as are beyond all suspicion." His wife was not on the list as the couple had already committed to continence. Other councils permitted an unmarried daughter to live with the cleric (if he had a daughter, then he may have had a wife still living -- but she was not to live with him).

This followed the first legislation that we know of which addressed this issue, around the year 305, at the Council of Elvira (a town whose ruins lie outside of Granada in Spain). Canon 33 states: "Bishops, presbyters, deacons, and others with a position in the ministry are to abstain completely from sexual relations with their wives."

It is a basic principle of canon law (as with most legal systems) that laws are not arbitrarily invented out of thin air, but rather enshrine or emphasize existing praxis, customs, or rules. Subsequent synods and councils, whether Ecumenical or regional or local, confirm this law from then on, until the 12th century, at the First and Second Lateran Councils, when the Church began to ordain only single men (later reinforced at Lateran IV in 1215 and then at Trent).

The New Testament origins of this discipline can be found in the Gospels (the "eunuch logion" and the list of things renounced in Matthew 19:29, Mark 10:29, and Luke 18:29 which specifically mentions giving up one's wife), and in St. Paul (the once-married man as being suitable to become overseer {1 Tim. 3:2 and 3:12, Titus 1:6}, i.e., capable of assuming continence, as opposed to the man who remarried after being widowed being less likely to make the renunciation -- St. Paul uses the same criterion for those to be enrolled as widows {1 Tim. 5:9} -- and couples who are to leave themselves "free for prayer" {1 Cor. 7:5} which has great implications for those who would "pray always," etc.).

There are sparse hints in texts of the second century of the existence of continence observances ("ἐγκρατεῖς περὶ πάντα" in St. Polycarp to the Philippians, or references in the Shepherd of Hermas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla, not by any means strictly Gnostic, though with some texts belonging to the Encratite movement), and clearer indications after 200 A.D. (Tertullian, Origen, the Hippolytus who railed against Pope Callixtus for ordaining men who had been married more than once, and other sources). Even in such early times the Church had a balanced view of conjugal life: the heretic Marcion was excommunicated in 144 A.D. for insisting that married catechumens who would not renounce marital relations should not be baptized. There are other examples from the third century as well which deserve attention from those just hearing about this topic for the first time (see reading list below).

Clerics in minor orders (porter, lector, cantor in the East, exorcist, acolyte) could marry, and in the Eastern Catholic Churches they still do (at least the non-monastics may, except in the Syro-Malabar and -Malankara Churches, which have celibate clergy). The formalization of the Eastern discipline of temporary continence for married higher clerics dates from the second "Trullan" council in 691-692. This temporary observance of continence, similar to that of the Levitical priesthood, is still the opening rubric of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: "...he [the priest] is to abstain from the evening before."* As much as people want to believe that the Eastern Churches always have the older observance, it is simply not the case.

Reading the comments posted on this issue, on The Deacon's Bench blog or the Anchoress or any of the other blogs, it is evident that there is still an immense amount of confusion about this issue, as well as a truly breathtaking lack of knowledge not so much of canon law or theology or Scripture but basic Church history. The highly educated laity desired by Vatican II is still not yet realized, even 45 years after its closure. Most distressing of all is the apparent lack of interest in doing even a minimal amount of reading or research on the topic BEFORE commenting.

So here is a very minimal reading list, in addition to the article by Dr. Peters (I suspect the folks who are up in arms about this have not read the following):

The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy by Christian Cochini SJ (the book that changed my life)

Celibacy in the Early Church by Stefan Heid

Clerical Celibacy in East and West by Roman Cholij (and this fine article)

Priestly Celibacy Today by Thomas McGovern

The Case for Clerical Celibacy by Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler

The Theology of Priestly Celibacy by Stanley L. Jaki

These works will answer all the questions and confused statements I have read so far in the blog comments. There are a few books out there which deny there was an early continence discipline (such as the one by Heinz-Jürgen Vogels, Zölibat: eine Gabe, kein Gesetz) but I do not find them convincing next to the incomparable and unchallenged scholarship of the great Father Cochini or the meticulous work of Father Heid or Roman Cholij. I want to emphasize the "unchallenged" aspect of these works: no one has offered a meaningful and thorough scholarly rebuttal to these authors (and no, Roman Cholij has not "renounced" his position or repudiated his own book).

The issue of whether or not celibacy or continence is "unnatural" is ridiculous: human beings, alone among all living species, are the only ones who can choose to not reproduce (or rather, procreate) -- to abstain from sexual relations for one reason or another -- and so, far from being "unnatural," continence is instead uniquely human. The issue of loneliness among celibate clergy is, on the other hand, quite serious. But as for marriage being a supposed "cure" for this, I myself as a single person have observed that some of the loneliest people I've ever known are married or in long-term relationships. I would like to see all the people who fret about the loneliness of celibate clergy in their empty rectories routinely invite their parish priests over for Sunday lunch after Mass, or for one or two evenings a week for supper with the family, or to get together with other parishioners to inquire and make sure that their pastor, their Father, does not find that he is alone at a time when he does not want to be.

No one is suggesting that in the Latin Church married clergy and their wives suddenly "take the pledge." I think all that Dr. Peters is asking for is a clarification (for which I would be grateful as well) as to why this immemorial discipline vanished without comment at the time the permanent diaconate was "restored" (there was no "permanent diaconate" in the early Church: "permanent" and "transitional" as terms applied to the diaconate are of recent origin -- there was only "the diaconate" which some men stayed in for life, while others went on to become priests -- one cannot "restore" something which did not exist, in the strict sense). One might have hoped for some such comment in Sacrum Diaconatus Ordinem or Ad Pascendum. Something to the effect of "and now, for the first time in the history of the Church, married men may be ordained to major orders without any change or modifcation of their married life," or some such statement. But nothing was said.

Here's someone who thinks Dr. Peters is pursuing this topic almost out of a kind of prurience, a judgment which I find to be quite rash:

"The overarching question for me, especially in light of the actual practice of the Church with respect to permanent deacons and the biblical teaching of Paul, is what is at stake in this argument for Ed Peters? What’s the point? What is so troubling about married permanent deacons having sexual relations with their wives? What Ed Peters argues conjures up the ghosts, past, present and future, of a Church that has trouble with sex, even in its properly ordered place. Something a little bit off with sex, isn’t there? If only God could have done a better job with that. Not, “no sex, please, we’re British,” but, “no sex, please, they’re deacons.” Except it is not the Church that has a problem with married permanent deacons having sex with their wives, it is Ed Peters."

I am amazed at this statement, but not surprised. Here is a Biblical scholar seemingly caught off guard, to the point of making him sound defensive. Perhaps (and I know I'm really reaching here, but it's the only thing I can come up with) because he is a a Mennonite, he may have difficulty understanding that it is not the Catholic Church or Dr. Peters who have "trouble with sex," but rather humanity, marked by original sin, which most certainly does (which includes clergy, married or not). This debate seems to have struck a nerve with those who are married. I know several married people who were convinced that Vatican II leveled the playing field and declared virginity and marriage to be equal. Imagine their surprise when they actually read Optatam Totius, one of the last documents of the Council, the fruit of its mature reflection, which states that while those in training for the priesthood should appreciate the dignity of Christian marriage, "they should recognize the greater excellence of virginity consecrated to Christ." (10.) As Father Jaki pointed out in his book on celibacy, the "new theologians" who describe marital love as "the rose-strewn high-road to the highest virtue" are being very modern indeed. (p. 166)

I am no theologian or Biblical scholar, but to me it seems to be a difference not between "good" and "better," but between "good" and "very good," words which are not used lightly in the Scriptures. Marriage has always been highly valued by the Church (and is a Sacrament), and virginity and continence even more highly. Is that not enough? To be highly valued? Yes, there have been times when marriage was not as highly valued in the Church in one part of the world or another (I am thinking of my mother's Catholic ancestors in Ireland, where cultural factors led some people to think of conjugal relations with a more than a hint of shame).

I have never met a married permanent deacon I did not think was a splendid asset and a blessing to the Church (actually, I can think of two who may not have been completely splendid, but that's only two in 30 years. UPDATE: I've met a third...). As the USCCB website says:

As ministers of Word, deacons proclaim the Gospel, preach, and teach in the name of the Church. As ministers of Sacrament, deacons baptize, lead the faithful in prayer, witness marriages, and conduct wake and funeral services. As ministers of Charity, deacons are leaders in identifying the needs of others, then marshalling the Church's resources to meet those needs. Deacons are also dedicated to eliminating the injustices or inequities that cause such needs. But no matter what specific functions a deacon performs, they flow from his sacramental identity. In other words, it is not only WHAT a deacon does, but WHO a deacon is, that is important.

I know many parishes which, if they were to lose their deacons, would be all but shuttered within weeks. Likewise, some of the finest and holiest priests I have ever met are married converts from Anglicanism who have been ordained Catholic priests.

So, if everyone could just take a deep breath and sit down to read just the first few chapters of Fr. Cochini's book (or even Fr. McGovern's book as a primer, which is available online here), I think they would be more at peace and less upset or anxious about the ancient observance of married continence. After all, part of the efforts of the Church before, during, and after Vatican II was to try to recover some of the beauty of the early Church and its practices. Most notable among these were things like removing some of the "medieval accretions" from the liturgy and restoring the chalice to the laity at Mass, though I bet that many people today would balk at other beautiful practices of the early Church, such as rising before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ, lengthy fasts, public penances which lasted for years, men and women on separate sides of the assembly, and women having to cover their heads -- this last one also seems to have slipped though the cracks after Vatican II.

There is a great deal more, but it is not possible to do full justice to so complex a subject as this in, of all things, blog format. There are a number of principles at work here, teased out from the writing of the Fathers, or from the development of the liturgy, such as qui sacramenta contrectant, and other keys to understanding clerical continence which are more difficult for non-specialists to understand (avoiding digamy propter continentiam futuram, the early concept of the clerus, etc.). This issue, which embraces Scripture, history, theology, canon law, anthropology, sociology, and other areas, cannot be fully understood in the equivalent of an electronic sound-bite. Like most things of importance, it requires effort -- putting in the time to make up for never having seriously studied Greek or Latin or Syriac, or patristics or ecclesiology, or dogmatic theology or sacramental theology or moral theology, or years of canon law (which is more than the 1917 and 1983 Codes, but rather stretches back to the earliest days of the Church), or the history of the Roman Empire, the history of the Councils, the history of the papacy, etc. Once again, these things take time, and a fair amount of effort. I know we Americans have a strange aversion to reading history, but for those who want to participate in a serious way in this conversation, there's no time like the present to hit the books.

A final word about the "gift" of celibacy. I would assume that many, though not all, of those who enter religious life (a monastic community, or a community with an "active" apostolate, such as the Dominicans or Jesuits), as well as a fair number who go into the diocesan priesthood, have some sort of special "gift" from God, something which lets them live with great ease and serenity a life of continence as unmarried persons in the chastity appropriate to their vocation. There are also vast numbers of single people who do not belong, or feel called to belong, to a religious community, and who may not even be single entirely by choice. Most of them live as single people "in the world" and have jobs and friends and hobbies, but perhaps not a special "gift" of celibacy. Gift or no gift, however, they too are called to live a life of chastity in total continence as a simple duty of their state in life, as are the married persons who are suddenly widowed** or who because of unavoidable separation or illness must also switch to living lives of total continence even without a special "gift." It used to be taught in catechism classes that if we are faithful, if we pray, then God will surely not fail to give us all the graces necessary for our state in life. I personally believe it is still true.

Just a personal note in closing: if people are going to engage in discussion of canon law, they should at least spell it correctly. It's canon law, not cannon law, no matter how much I wish at times it could be.

* From The Sacred and Divine Liturgy of our Holy Father John Chrysostom. Synod of the Hierarchy of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Basilian Press, Toronto, 1988, p. 9. I don't know if it is observed, nor do I necessarily care. But it is still "on the books," literally.

** And this applies in a special way to married permanent deacons and married priests who become widowers and who are forbidden to marry again, the current canon prohibiting marriage to major clerics being the only vestige of the ancient continence discipline, since why would such a married cleric who loses his wife not be able to marry again if no restrictions were placed on his married life before -- unless he had already made (or was supposed to have made) the definitive renunciation?

Vail

2011-01-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

Short trip to the Rockies with a fellow Rome survivor and a great young theology professor. The "Campo de' Fiori" thing was funny -- it's just soooooooo not Rome.... O;)

Noveritis 2011

2011-01-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

Noveritis, fratres carissimi, quod annuente Dei misericordia, sicut de Nativitate Domini nostri Jesu Christi gavisi sumus, ita et de Resurrectione ejusdem Salvatoris nostri gaudium vobis annuntiamus. Die vigesima Februarii erit Dominica in Septuagesima. Nona Martii dies Cinerum, et initium jejunii sacratissimae Quadragesimae. Vigesima quarta Aprilis sanctum Pascha Domini nostri Jesu Christi cum gaudio celebrabitis. Secunda Junii erit Ascensio Domini nostri Jesu Christi. Duodecima ejusdem Festum Pentecostes. Vigesima tertia ejusdem Festum sacratissimi Corporis Christi. Vigesima septima Novembris Dominica prima Adventus Domini nostri Jesu Christi, cui est honor et gloria, in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Vatican II: "Open the windows" -- ? Not exactly...

2010-12-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

Did Blessed Pope John XXIII ever say that in calling a Council he wanted to "open the windows" of the Church or let in fresh air or any other similar statement? It seems he did not.

In a volume to be published in 2011 a professor at the Gregorian, in an article on ecclesiology, describes how difficult and ultimately impossible it was to account for this quote. The pope did not give interviews, and the widely circulated account of the episode (including in the Wikipedia article on John XXIII*) seems to have no solid foundation. The professor in question even went to talk to Archbishop Loris Capovilla, John XXIII's personal secretary, now 95, and asked what the origin of the Pope's statement might be. According to Archbishop Capovilla the Holy Father never said it. He explained that being of good Italian peasant stock, the Pope never would have said such a thing: he, like most Italians, had a horror of drafts. Air movement is believed to bring illness and perhaps even bad luck.

To confirm this for the incredulous who have never lived in Italy (I survived 5 years in Rome myself) the following is enlightening.

'There are also medical superstitions. The colpo d’aria (“punch of air” – a draft) is considered extremely dangerous, causing anything from a cold to paralysis. One friend claims to have suffered a day-long stiffening of one side of her face and neck, due to riding in a fast-moving car with the window down so that cold air was blowing on her.

In the early years of our relationship, Enrico and I argued about whether a window could be left open, even during the hottest summer nights, because it would allow a draft to blow onto our heads, with possibly fatal consequences. I was scornful of this, having grown up in Bangkok sleeping under a window air conditioner set so cold that it would freeze solid at night. We finally solved the dilemma by moving the bed away from the windows. Early on in Milan, he never wanted a fan to blow on him, but with the increasingly hot summers we’ve been having, we moved from a standing fan to a ceiling fan, and I guess he’s gotten used to it. Some nights this summer, we had BOTH fans blowing full on us – there was no other way to sleep in the heat.

The funny thing is, the colpo d’aria never seems to strike below the waist. An Italian woman who would cringe from the slightest draft coming in a window will go out in January’s worst winds, wearing a miniskirt, sheer stockings, and skimpy high heels.'

(http://www.beginningwithi.com/comments/2003/11/07/very-supertitious-some-italian-folk-beliefs/)

From the delightful blog My Bella Vita, citing traditions of Southern Italy which actually are to be found throughout the entire county:

'- Sit in front of the air-conditioning? Well, maybe you won’t DIE from this, but you could catch a horrific sore throat! Apparently the cold air, when blown directly towards your face, is toxic. Who knew? So, once again – dodge that draft!

- Use the air conditioning? Who knew Americans were such risk-takers? People throughout the country put their lives at risk every day simply by turning on the air. Italians are much smarter about this. If you are hot, you must stay hot, or your body will react badly and incite a sudden death! I kid you not. My gym is not air conditioned for this very reason, and I have to get plum pissy at home before they turn on the AC in the summer. This, by the way, applies to all central heating units and ceiling fans. Another case of draft dodging? I think so!

- Sit by an open window when the wind is blowing? For reasons similar to the two above examples – I wouldn’t do it!'

(http://my-bellavita.com/2010/01/06/dodging-the-draft/)

A book published this year, Cultural Competencies For Nurses: Impact On Health And Illness, by Linda Dayer-Berenson, has the following to say on the subject of drafts regarding patients of Italian ancestry in the United States on page 288:

"Italian Americans have several traditional health beliefs including the belief that the cause of illness is the result of a contagion or contamination caused by heredity related to a supernatural or human cause, related to wind currents that bear diseases, or psychosomatic causes." First generation patients are more likely to have the stronger beliefs in this regard.

So the verdict is: call a Council to open the windows and let in some air? I don't think so. To do that would invite disaster. Oh, wait...................

* 'Less than three months after his election as pope, John XXIII gave notice of his intention to convene an Ecumenical Council. While he expressed his intention in many messages over the next three years in formal detail, one of the best known images was of Pope John, when asked why the Council was needed, reportedly opening a window and saying, "I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in."'

Notice in the above that there is no attribution: "best known" and "reportedly" saying this to whom, and when?

I haven't heard any in a while......

2010-12-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

'I became interested in sacred music as a practitioner because the tragedy of its loss is so undeniably obvious to any practicing Catholic. Given our heritage, given what Catholicism has done artistically through the ages (we invented music notation, for example), given what Vatican II called the “treasury of sacred music,” it is shocking how absent it is from our parishes.'

The new "with it" O:)

2010-12-22T18:27:00.000-08:00

True, according to NPR!

As for dressing simply, or wearing lay clothes, in order to be more 'accessible' to the people, how would I be more accessible if no one can tell I'm a Sister?

I'm the Pope of me

2010-11-30T17:34:00.000-08:00

'Everyone gets to be their own pope. Catholics are often no exception to this trend and many seem perfectly willing and able to dispense with whatever doctrines displease them and still declare themselves to be a “good Catholic.” For such as these faith has no apparent communal dimension, nothing outside oneself which should require adherence in order to qualify for membership. No, such a notion that someone other than me gets to say what is the true faith is obnoxious to many. They insist that faith be a purely private declaration of what seems true “to me.” To suggest that certain criteria ought be met in order to “be Catholic” offends against their God-given right to design their own faith and, I would argue, their own God.'

Interesting statistics from Georgetown's CARA

2010-11-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com/2010/11/pies-damned-pies-and-statistics-is.html

Happy new liturgical year!

2010-11-27T17:49:00.001-08:00

Maronite novice

2010-11-26T18:18:00.000-08:00

More here! O=)

Eminenza Piacenza!

2010-11-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Heartfelt thanks to John Sonnen for always being in the right place at the right time with his camera! And Virginia looks as radiant as ever... O:)

An exchange of letters on the "new" Missal translations

2010-10-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

A young acquaintance from my time in Rome, a fellow pontifical student, has also returned to the United States, and is (unusually for a young person) rather upset about the forthcoming corrected translation of the Roman Missal. I am very fond of him, and do not want this to reveal his identity; so I am changing a few things in our exchange of e-mails that I hope would conceal his identity. His side of our exchange is dwarfed by my side of it, but I would rather post these ideas as they were, as e-mails traded, rather than attempt anything "editorial." I have made a few changes, but the conversation is for the most part as it happened, choppy and unpolished as are many e-mails.

~~~

The young man alerted me to the "What if we just said wait" petition and asked my opinion. He e-mailed me this:

~~~

Check out a recent article in “America” magazine written by Seattle
Cathedral pastor, Fr. Ryan. He comments on the translations coming
soon. Some would call them bold:
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12045

He even set up a web site: http://www.whatifwejustsaidwait.org

The best line: "Nor do I want to belabor the fact that those who
prepared the translations seem to be far better versed in Latin than
in English."

Your thoughts?

~~~

I sent him this:

~~~

You know, I never cease to be amazed at our brothers and sisters who get all worked up over this stuff BELATEDLY. The ball got rolling on this, albeit slowly, with Liturgiam Authenticam, nine years ago, and as recently as a year and a half ago this was the state of things: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0803548.htm

It's as if they don't even bother to keep abreast of things happening in the Church UNTIL AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT SHOWS UP IN THE NY TIMES. THEN they are outraged. It just stuns me every time. And, on the basis that they are good, faithful, totally involved Catholics, they then demand a belated hearing, or want to start a 'grassroots' effort.

Ok, fine -- but where have they been all this time? What do they normally do to stay current with the Church and all that is going on? Do they EVER think to read, once or twice a month (a year?) l'Osservatore Romano's English edition? Do they browse the USCCB website on a regular basis? Once a month, say? Browse the Vatican website? I'm guessing not. So it's both funny and sad for me. More sad than funny.

It's like when Summorum Pontificum came out --"Pope allows Latin Mass" or some such idiocy was sprung on everyone from the pages of the NY Times. Or with the SSPX -- as if it all happened overnight, instead of over 20 years. Same with the Anglicans who want to join the Church (but not have to subject themselves to our -- sigh -- 'ordinary' liturgy. I don't blame them on that one....). All of this has been years in the making -- and I think everyone actually does know that the Church works at a snail's pace -- so why is all this a surprise to them?

~~~

He wrote back this:

~~~

I remember hearing about these changes a few years ago - the discussion centered mainly on changing when and where we would say the Lord's Prayer. I think new translations are fine but only if they sound right. Those translations are just bad!

You have to keep in mind that religion isn't that all important to a lot of people; and it's not fair to judge them when they hear news belatedly. I'm not making any excuses, but it's true. I don't think many people have heard of the [l'Osservatore] Romano outside of those who have gone to Rome. If it's not in the church bulletin or in the archdiocese's newspaper people aren't going to hear about it. We can have a whole different debate about media and how people get their news. The same problem exists with foreign news - or better said the lack thereof in U.S. newspapers, radio and television news. If we don't even get international news about what's going on in a Honduran presidency coup d'état, why would you expect the ordinary person to know what comes out of Rome?

I remember [a friend] telling me about the Anglican rite coming right around the corner a few years ago. I don't agree with a lot of what Benedict has done though. Maybe this opinion is formed as a member of the ignorant masses who don't read the Romano, but taking back the priest who denied the Holocaust and masses in Latin take us two steps back for every one step ahead. For example, we got this super conservative priest from Spain who started substituting the Spanish language masses at our parish about a year ago. He started preaching in Latin and saying the Mass in Latin even though it's a Spanish mass. Attendance dropped from what used to be standing-room only to maybe the congregation being two-thirds full. He was so conservative, archaic and cold to the people, not to mention rude, that he turned a lot of people away from our parish. Many went to other nearby parishes, but a lot went to Protestant and Evangelical churches. The thing is many immigrants are attracted to our parish because it's Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, which translates into a warm, loving place of acceptance. Remember, it was she who said, "Why do you worry? Am I not here who is your mother?" Anyway, he's been gone for a few weeks now and I've noticed the congregation starting to fill up little by little with new arrivals who never knew him.

Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

~~~

My long-winded reply was as follows:

~~~

My dear T., I think that some of what I have to say is probably going to come across as exasperated and even a bit angry, and if that is the case, rest assured it is NOT directed in any way at a little angel like you! But I do indeed have foremost in mind that religion is not all that important to a lot of people, just like you said, and I don't judge them, but yes I do get annoyed with them at times. This is one of the most important aspects of the modern "liturgy wars" -- that you have a vast number of people who don't practice their faith, for whom religion is simply not a huge factor in their lives, or who only show up at Christmas and Easter, or at wedding or funerals; and beyond that there is still a fair number who attend Mass on most Sundays with varying levels of engagement or Christian commitment (about 25 to 30 percent of US Catholics, which is way better than in most of Europe...) and an even smaller number who go to daily Mass. If something is really important to someone, then that person devotes all or at least a lot of his or her time to it, at least as much as possible, to learn as much as possible, to become an "expert" in it, if you will. I don't suppose that absolutely everyone can do that with their faith, but God remains, and should remain, first and foremost, and the worship of God in the liturgy takes first priority (as the Holy Father quoted St. Benedict in his Christmas homily). Everything else is secondary. Everything. (And you may not *agree* with a lot of what Benedict XVI has done, but then if I recall correctly you don't *agree* with the filioque either -- I'm just saying!)

Look, I think that the bottom line is this: speaking of St. Benedict, there is no getting away from the fact that the Liturgical Movement, which was started by Benedictine monks, made a mistake or a miscalculation, viz., that everyone in the world should come to love the liturgy (Mass and Office) and indeed would come to love the liturgy as much as they, the monks, did -- if only somehow they could be catechized or formed or educated in it sufficiently. Private piety was fine -- but as the movement gathered strength (and it was always fairly small and centered around monasteries and the academic world), it seemed more and more urgent to get people to, as Pope St. Pius X eventually put it, "not pray AT Mass, but pray the Mass!" (Never mind that Pius X himself had the ancient order of the psalter scuttled.)

The movement, which I'm guessing you've studied, and remembering again that it was confined to a rather rarefied world, tried to propose various changes to get the people "involved" and MAKE them "participate" without taking into account how the great majority of people, good and devout in their own way, most likely would never become true liturgical enthusiasts. Some would never be able to work themselves up to the level of participation the liturgists thought they should -- they didn't want to, as I myself sometimes don't want to, preferring to have the ordained ministers do all the work (that they are supposed to do, that they are formally trained to do) and let me just encounter it as best I can, all the more so if it is solemn and reverent (and if there is chant and polyphony which I love) with no one telling me to turn to page 149 to sing this or that, like in Protestant service, or to please be seated for the announcements, or turn and greet my neighbor.

Yes, the Mass is our greatest treasure -- other faiths also do great charitable works, etc. -- but only we worship God in this way, in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:21-24), down the centuries, through the sacred liturgy. Is it how the Apostles and the first Christians worshiped? We don't know for sure exactly how they worshiped, though we do know that it was not exactly like Solemn High Mass. But the earliest form of the Roman Rite shows that many of the elements we recognize now as part of the traditional "extraordinary" form, had their origin at least in the 4th century, incorporating some of the oldest elements of all, from a time when liturgical debates centered around whether or not Easter should be celebrated on the 14th Nisan. Newman's "The Development of Christian Doctrine" gives a good example of how the most ancient beliefs and practices of Christianity developed over time to be what they are now, and his principles can apply to the liturgy as well.

And I can't help but wonder just how much of this you have studied? I mean really and seriously studied. I would have to assume you are up on most of these historical details, no? Since you are asking about it and have already formed an opinion about it, right? Surely you have read Fortescue, Cabrol, Jungmann, Guardini, Bouyer and Gamber and the other authorities on this? It was one of the greatest misfortunes that the Consilium under Bugnini did not (apparently) have access to the best materials, like Fortescue, for one reason or another (I am not a conspiracy theorist about this...), but attempting to fantasize and "reconstruct" a Mass of the earliest days of the Church -- cutting and pasting it together as a committee -- was a pathetic 1960s exercise and a waste of time. No one knows exactly, in all details, what our Christian forebears did at the eucharistic synaxis -- never documented? lost? the disciplina arcani? -- but the notion that the Church went off the rails liturgically in the 4th century and only recovered itself after Vatican II is utterly ridiculous as the best of liturgy scholars have pointed out. If we were supposed to ignore our history and T/tradition, then why not have all of us throw away our rosaries and get rid of our Stations of the Cross, tear down our churches and close our monasteries (since we had none in the beginning), and go back to getting up before dawn to "sing a hymn to Christ as to a god" and have penances which took years to fulfill, and having men and women on separate sides of the assembly (and ladies keep your heads covered!) -- as if only the first century or so of the church was valid and everything that came later was a corruption.

Since this is a subject obviously of interest to you, I am sure you recall how when the first draft of the Mass was presented to Paul VI in its supposedly "restored" or "pristine" form, after having had all those "dreadful medieval accretions" removed, that Paul VI had to plead with the Consilium to leave in some of the dreadful accretions like the Nicene Creed (not recited at Mass till the 10th c.) and the Our Father and Agnus Dei, if only for purely sentimental reasons.

Yes, the Liturgical Movement did promote the idea of having at least the readings in the local language -- since its counterpart, the Biblical Movement, was similarly gung-ho on getting everyone to become a Scripture scholar, and also presumed everyone would have a comparable level of interest and enthusiasm, not to mention leisure time for study. And then a funny thing happened: inexpensive hand-missals began being mass produced. I have the one my grandfather was given as a teenager in 1908 -- and there it all is, in Latin on one side and English on the other, with detailed explanations on almost every page. I can still tell which pages he used the most. And with that...people could now follow along very, very easily each and every word that was said and every gesture (plus literacy rates around the world were growing exponentially), and I regard this development as one of the greatest blessings of modern technology. But did it turn people into liturgical enthusiasts and experts?

As the Liturgical Movement progressed though the 20th c., more and more congresses and colloquia and conferences tried to come up with ways to get more and more people to participate in the liturgy the way THEY, the "experts", thought they should be participating. All sorts of "worship aids" were developed, and already in the 1950s there were significant changes to Holy Week and of course the eucharistic fast was reduced from midnight to three hours, as I'm sure you will recall, in 1953, which allowed for evening celebrations of Mass. Finally, the Second Vatican Council decided it would take up the issue of the liturgy first and foremost. The debates over changing the ancient liturgy were bitter -- no doubt you have gone back and read all the coverage even in the secular press of that time.

But even with Sacrosanctum Concilium's directives, what the Consilium produced bears little resemblance to what the Council Fathers proposed -- there's no way around that. And especially when it came to the issue of language -- by NO MEANS was Latin to be discarded and the entire Mass put into the local language. This happened almost as an afterthought -- you know why? Here's what I think: somewhere along the way, the "powers that be" made a decision -- if you can even call it that -- that after all this time, the people simply were not able to grasp the liturgy despite all the efforts of liturgists and catechists. The people were too stupid, and the only hope now was to put everything into their own language and hope for the best. It was a permission, an option, and eventually all of the world's Episcopal Conferences asked for the permission, submitted their translations, and got them approved. But it wasn't supposed to be like that, as the reactions of the then-surviving Council Fathers witness. The whole Mass was NEVER meant to be put totally into the vernacular. And now that it is, do people really participate more? About 20 out of 150 people at Sunday Mass today actually "sang" the entrance hymn, and it went downhill from there. Stop and ask each person coming out of Mass "what is the Mass?" or "what were the readings" -- what sort of answers do you think you would get? The 75 percent of U.S. Catholics who used to go to Mass is now down to about 25 percent, as I said above, so it looks to me like the "participation" efforts backfired since, as one scholar has pointed out, all the people who no longer go to Mass are not "participating" at all.

One notes in particular the absence of men. In every parish I have ever belonged to, it is made up primarily of old ladies (with some men showing up with their families perhaps on Sundays...). In our parish in Rome, which has the old rite, I was the oldest lady there. Why? I blame the heavily feminized values of the modern rite -- it is anthropologically attuned to the female, with sentimental songs, and the "sign of peace" wave or handshake (which feels forced, even to me, and I'm a girl!) -- it's also face-to-face, as women tend to relate, not side-by-side and facing the same direction as men tend to interact and which is the hallmark of the ad orientem worship of the old rite.

And the vernacular they put forward couldn't be the best, of course, but the most pedestrian -- since again, people are dumb. That the Greek and Latin used by the early church was certainly far above common "street" Latin or Greek or the local dialect, and even the Book of Common Prayer was in a highly refined English, not the English of the average person of the day, never seemed to occur to the translators. Even more amazingly, the consensus was that even in countries which had languages derived from Latin -- in all the places Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese were spoken -- that NO ONE could really tell that "PATER NOSTER" meant the same as "PADRE NOSTRO" and "NOTRE PERE" and "PADRE NUESTRO" and "PAI NOSSO".

And the translation we now have in our current Missal -- which was certainly "foisted" upon us, at a time when the laity still had the remnants of Catholic culture, unlike now -- was accepted entirely uncritically, except by people who couldn't bear the changes and who got up and walked out of church and never came back (and certainly did not go out and put a petition together...except for a few notables in England). There was ZERO worldwide demand for a "new" Mass and certainly not one in the vernacular -- except from (Heaven help us) "liturgists" and scholars. And the fruits? Not the "great leap forward" in Christian life it was all supposed to be. At least on that point there is no dispute. The chief blessing of the older form of the Mass was, and still is, that one does not have to be an "expert" -- there are no rubrics whatsoever for the people, and one participates, or does not participate, according to one's own condition. Those who want to be totally engaged can be. I am one of those persons. But there are those who simply want to just sit there, and just sort of...experience it in a way that is comfortable for them, whatever that may be, and on rare occasions I find my very tired self in their ranks too. Are they getting a lot out of it? I don't know. Does pressuring them to get more out of it help the situation? No, I would say it doesn't. Should it at least be as beautiful and reverent as possible? Yes. Was it always so in the past? No. Is it more often so now? Certainly not.

And by the way, as I'm sure you know, the Mass of Paul VI has its NORMATIVE version in Latin -- all vernacular translations are a PERMISSION. So, "Masses in Latin" is not the issue here. How many Catholics do you think tuned in to watch Christmas Midnight Mass broadcast from St. Peter's and said, "Whoa, what's he saying? Switch the channel!"

Again, you are right: most folks just aren't that into religion. Which brings me to my point: if that is the case, if you are just not that *into* the practice and knowledge of your Catholic faith, then let the things that matter to the people to whom they matter, matter. Don't get in the way and make a fuss and pretend that suddenly it now matters to you too, when this is the first you are hearing of it -- again, did Liturgiam Authenticam get by you? Yeah, I bet it did. I do not blame these folks for not being up to speed on this -- though I know I sound pretty grumpy about it. I recall what Walter Cronkite said about ten years ago in an interview, when asked what was wrong with American news broadcasts. He said: "They give us what we want to know, but not what we need to know." T., you are right about the media -- and for those who are stunned or shocked by a 20 second soundbite about a coup in Honduras, will the all the shocked, shocked! people go to other sources and find out what triggered it? What the history of it was? No, probably not. And that's ok, but either commit to getting involved or chalk it up to "it wasn't on my radar and I'm...well, actually not that into it." Am I right about this?

I have a good friend, a woman from a big Catholic family, now a grandmother, who had the Baltimore catechism all through her youth, life-long daily Mass goer (including the older form of the Mass all through childhood and into her teens), member of a Third Order, helps with sacristy linens and is on several parish committees, and was once the secretary to an archbishop. Her house has four giant bookcases full of Catholic books -- mostly "devotional" stuff, novena to the Sacred Heart, the Story of a Soul, Introduction to the Devout Life, the Cloud of Unknowing, biographies of dozens of Saints, The Secrets of the Rosary, etc. Subscribes to most major Catholic periodicals -- National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, etc. Has EWTN on all the time. Has a regular spiritual director too. Now, at some point in our many conversations about the faith I learned that she had never heard the word "patristics" and had no idea what that was, nor had she ever heard of the Didache (though "Father, we thank thee who hast planted" is her favorite hymn), or any other of the Christian classics of the first millennium (with the possible exception of St. Augustine's Confessions), could place Trent in the 16th c. but had no idea in which centuries any of the preceding Councils took place, that deliberately withholding a mortal sin in confession invalidates the whole thing, and thought that the old prayers with "300 days' indulgence" meant 300 "days off" of Purgatory. What she did know was that according to some authors priests are given a second guardian angel upon ordination. I once mentioned ICEL -- and she stared blankly. "ICEL?" I repeated "I. C. E. L. -- ICEL." She finally asked what it was. I told her. She had no idea. And she is very dedicated to following along in the missalette at Mass, and occasionally will prod others to do likewise if she sees them standing there empty-handed. Did it never once occur to her to look and see where on earth all those texts come from? Who wrote the words she is saying (since she is certainly old enough to remember when the vernacular began to be used)? Flip to the front or back cover on the inside to see what's there? Who published this thing? Obviously not. Just not that interested.

And of course I have to say that she is not one of the people all worked up over the new translations. I think that ultimately it simply does not matter to her. She goes to Mass primarily to be able to receive Holy Communion anyway, a laudable reason. She's quite saintly.

So, if this was not on someone's radar before, as much as I want to give a sympathetic hearing to the person who may have been taken by surprise, all the more so if that person is upset for one reason or another by this development (and I include priests, who certainly should know better, like the cathedral rector you mention), I would ultimately say to let it go. Yes, let it go if it did not interest you before, or if it did not matter to you before, or if you never read about any of this before. Let it go. Let it remain the province of the people for whom this sort of thing does desperately matter. If it was not of burning interest to you previously, I don't see why it should be now. If you've been "sleepwalking" in the practice of your faith and this is some kind of wake up call, well, that's fine. Be more involved, yes, but realize that you are coming very late to the game and conduct yourself accordingly: you have a lot to learn, and whining will get you nowhere, just like in all other areas and aspects of adult life. As a good Christian, take care of your soul, admit your mistakes, take a deep breath and do better next time -- we don't get do-overs. All we have is today.

After having said all this, fortunately for me translation disputes are minor issues -- I avoid them for the most part completely, since I usually attend the extraordinary form of the Mass and pray the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary most days, and I am learning to read the Scriptures in the original Greek. So in a way, translation issues simply don't exist for me. But T., I find it strange that you would associate the issue of new English translations with "that priest" who was "taken back" even though he denied the Holocaust -- I can only assume you mean Bishop Williamson of the SSPX? But surely you do know he has not been "taken back" but rather that the excommunication he and the other bishops consecrated with him incurred has been lifted, just as Paul VI lifted the excommunication on all the Orthodox the evening before the Second Vatican Council closed. I am sure you are following the negotiations as they are unfolding in Rome even as we speak/type, but he and the other bishops of the SSPX remain in "imperfect communion" after all these years -- just like the Orthodox. Though the Holy Father finally granting them the clemency they have sought since 1988 can, I think, only be seen as the merciful act of a true father and shepherd, and is unrelated to one nut-job in the mix (I come from a family of Holocaust survivors -- remember that my father was Orthodox Jewish, and while he escaped Hungary in time, half his family did not). I do indeed hope that the SSPX manages to accept the Holy Father's care and concern for their souls and that they speedily resolve their position -- the Catholic Church is really big and there is room for them too, alongside all the religious Sisters who are now Reiki practitioners instead of third grade teachers. I am sorry to hear about the "conservative" Spanish priest with the unpleasant personality. I know some very traditional priests, indeed traditionalists, who have off-putting manners, but then I have had plenty of negative experiences with "Novus Ordo" priests too. I could write a book. (Oh, wait, I am writing a book...)

As far as I can tell, the saints and sinners attached to both forms of the Mass are about evenly represented. Though I personally am never quite so put off and actually frightened as by a supposedly "liberal" priest like the one I very timidly and politely asked about where I might be able to find the extraordinary form of the Mass in this archdiocese. He laughed in my face and said, "Latin?!? Ha! We don't go for that here -- we've got a whole other 'Latin' to think about -- Latin America!" Then he spun around and walked off still laughing. Now there's some true liberality for you.

Allow me to add that I firmly believe that accuracy and honesty, especially in matters of translation, are NOT incompatible with a warm, loving and accepting church as at NS de Guadalupe, indeed the two should go together and I cannot believe they would be considered mutually exclusive. As I type this, the image of Our Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is right outside my door in the courtyard and I entrust myself to her care each time I see her.

Your very little sister,
M.

PS Above somewhere I mentioned "the remnants of Catholic culture." T., remember that language is usually the guardian of the culture: lose the language and you usually lose the culture. Hence the importance of having immigrant kids keep up with their ancestral language. But as Catholics we, all of us, of all ethnic backgrounds, "lost" Latin, and the results are evident.
I grew up the daughter of a poor immigrant from a place no one had ever heard of or could find on a map, and the three years I lived in Hungary as a child were specifically so that I could learn the language and the culture. I am an American, from a small and persecuted ethnic minority, but as Catholic I recognize that Latin was our great cultural treasure, which played no favorites, or rather "favored neither one group or another" as John XXIII put it in "Veterum Sapientia." It should have been kept, for a vast number of reasons, especially at a time when travel is more and more common -- I mean, I am not sure how long it would take me to learn Mass in Vietnamese...