BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Please see preceding page for earlier posts today, 9/5/10, including the Holy Father's visit to Carpineto and today's Angelus. I have posted translations of both the Pope's homily in Carpineto and his Angelus message - both of them exceptional in its own way. His presentation of Leo XIII's person and Magisterium in a clear historical context was quite a tour de force, and his decision to sum up himself the core of his message for World Youth Day 2011 at the Angelus was an indication of how inadequately it was reported in the media, and, even more critical, how misleading was the narrow focus they chose to emphasize from the carefully-structured messsage!






Coming from someone whose comments have always been upbeat and fighting rightly in behalf of the faith, this piece by Cristina Odone, a former editor of the UK's Catholic Herald, comes across as surprisingly skeptical, even if it starts out on the right note. Perhaps, since she is a UK resident, she is merely being realistic, but there are positive ways of expressing realism without 'spinning' reality in any way. Besides, she makes a number of statements which are highly questionable, if not downright false, coming from someone like her! The Telegraph underscores the skeptic tone by the blatantly unrealistic headline it gave to the essay. Conversion in the mass is hardly ever the work of four days! Apostolic visits by the Successor of Peter are not evangelical revival carnivals with their spectacles of instantaneous mass 'healings and rebirth'.


Will we be converted
by the Pope’s visit?
By Cristina Odone

05 Sep 2010


The visitor to the More Hall care home in Stroud, Gloucestershire, usually finds an oasis of pious tranquillity. But for some days now, the Benedictine nuns who run the home have been in a state of high excitement: two of the sisters have won tickets to Birmingham on September 19 to see Pope Benedict XVI.

The beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman will take place at Cofton Park and – “God willing” – Sister Elsy Poonoly and another nun will be there. “We are very pleased,” Sr Elsy tells me, “and very excited.”

Threats of a citizen’s arrest; protests from survivors of priestly abuse and the gay rights lobby; some spectacular organisational bungling on the part of the Catholic hierarchy in this country: nothing can dent the sheer joy felt by many of Britain’s four million Catholics at the prospect of seeing the Pope in their midst.

In what must count as the annus horribilis of the Church, when every day seemed to bring fresh revelations of abuse by priests of their young charges, the Catholic faithful are hungry for reassurance.

Apart from a miracle – Richard Dawkins’s Damascene conversion? Cardinal Newman, resurrected, fulminating at the next gathering of the British Humanist Association? – the papal visit, with its pomp and picnics, is the best means to restore hope and rekindle faith.

“The visit gives us our one chance to hear the Pope directly,” says the composer James MacMillan. “It will be of immense value to us, as his flock, to receive his message without the media’s negative interpretation. The impact will be felt for decades – we’re still talking about John Paul II’s visit in 1982.”

This will be a very different papal visit. When Benedict XVI lands at Edinburgh airport on September 16, he will not drop to his knees and kiss the ground, as his predecessor did. This is not only because the octogenarian Pontiff is physically frail and less of a showman, but because the grand romance of that gesture would strike a false note today.

The Polish Pope’s coup de théâtre perfectly encapsulated the vigour and glamour of the Catholic Church 30 years ago. [????? Surely, this is a pink-colored retrospective gaze! Five years into John Paul II's Papacy, the 'vigour and glamour' at the time were attributed to him personally, not to the Catholic Church in full disarray following Vatican II and already written off by the seculars as irrelevant in today's world!]

The papacy was respected for waging battles against totalitarian regimes in the former USSR and South America. John Paul II, blessed with Hollywood magnetism and capable of Churchillian oratory, held non-Catholics as well as Catholics in thrall. ['Churchillian oratory'??? Without detracting from the great Pope's virtues, I don't think even Karol Wojtyla himself, despite his theatrical experience, would have claimed such an attribute for himself!]

These are different times. Catholics have watched in horror as, almost daily and almost in every country, broken men and women have come forth to tell of their ordeal at the hands of abusive priests. [This is the kind of loose factual exaggeration. almost a parody of truth, that is unforgivable when indulged by Catholics themselves!]

Here in Britain, Catholics have witnessed their Church being subjected to humiliating attacks from a commentariat which, more than anywhere in the world, is strident in its hostility to all religions.

MacMillan is convinced that Benedict will be able to “counter the primal anti-Catholicism here in Scotland and in England. We need to show people what the Pope is like. That will convert them.”

Privately, organisers of the papal visit must be wondering whether the numbers attending each event will be sufficient to fill the venues, let alone bring about the conversion of England.

As one source who asked not to be named explained, ticket sales outside of London have been disappointing and donations from the faithful limited.

“He’s not a money-spinner,” confirms Andreas Campomar, editorial director at the publishers Constable & Robinson. “There’s been no interest in doing a book on the papal visit, or a celebration of Benedict to tie-in with his coming. There is, instead, appetite for anti-Catholic, anti-Pope books centred on priestly abuse.” [The UK is not the world, and books about Benedict XVI - not to mention by him - continue to be written elsewhere, so while the lack of interest by UK publishers is lamentable, consider that between the official programs for the visit and the million booklets handed out by the local churches, that should far outnumber the buyers of anti-Pope literature (assuming that there is actually a significant market for it, even in the UK)!]

For Campomar, Benedict XVI is not only a victim of age-old anti-Catholic feeling, whipped up by the recent scandals, but also of anti-German prejudice. A half-German Catholic himself, Campomar sees the Pope as “fatally Germanic” in his precision and unwavering conviction.

“It boils down to his not being simpatico. People don’t warm to him.” [This man obviously has not watched any single public event with Benedict XVI - and clearly ignores (or is ignorant about) all the crowds he has drawn to him at the Vatican - outnumbering the crowds for John Paul II - and in all the Christian nations he has visited! I am surprised Odone simply takes down his word and does not offer a single factual statement in rebuttal, when facts and figures abound to do it with!}

Lord Guthrie, a Catholic convert, dismisses complaints that Benedict is not “a people person”. “This is a holy man, not a celebrity. We cannot judge him by the standards of a pop star. He would be horrified if he thought people saw him as anything other than a spiritual man who has devoted his whole life to the Church.”

Benedict would be horrified, too, one suspects, if either his Popemobile, a performance by the Irish clergy trio The Priests, or Carol Vorderman – the former Countdown presenter who has been hired as a warm-up before the Pope’s appearance at a Mass in Hyde Park – distracted the faithful from what he sees as his mission here: the beatification of John Henry Newman.

Newman’s work on the evolution of theology, his writings on religion and his theories of education have inspired generations of scholars. The hope is that his beatification will encourage legions of ordinary British Catholics to believe that they, too, can become spiritual local heroes.

Benedict, like John Paul II, who created more saints than all other Popes together, believes that beatification and canonisation can serve as powerful prods to renew a flagging faith. This is the “Yes we can” spirit, in a Catholic context.

From the sidelines, members of the established Church [of England] will watch with interest and perhaps not a little regret as a man who started life as one of their own is elevated to “Blessed” status.

Benedict XVI cannot be accused of “scalp-collecting” in Newman’s case; but few close to the Archbishop of Canterbury will forgive the Pope for trying to lure disaffected Anglicans to Rome during the row over women bishops last year. [How can Odone say such a thing? With Anglicanorum coetibus, he threw a lifeline across the Tiber, not a lure, for disaffected Anglicans who themselves asked to be taken in!]

Rowan Williams and Benedict XVI both boast a brilliant intellect, but neither seems inclined to use it to cement an ecumenical alliance. Those who hope that this visit will somehow thaw the frosty relations between Rome and Canterbury should see the Popemobile as proof of their delusion: there’s only room for one. [WHOA! What's with Odone? That's a whole raft of questionable statements right there: 1) Benedict XVI has not used his intellect to cement ecumenical alliance??? What should his intellect have told him - callously turn down traditional Anglicans who began knocking at the Vatican almost 20 years ago? 2) Is there anyone on either side - Catholic and Anglican - who thinks that an apostolic visit by the Bishop of Rome to his Catholic flock would be the occasion to 'thaw frosty relations' between Rome and Canterbury? The Pope is not visiting the UK to promote ecumenism but to confirm Catholics in their faith! 3) What does the configuration fo the Popemobile have to do with the Church of England? The only other prelate meant to share the Popemobile when the Pope is visiting is the local Catholic bishop!]

Can Benedict XVI transform the image of the Catholic Church in Britain in his four days here? A poll published this week shows the notion is not as risible as it may seem. [It may not be risible but it certainly is totally unrealistic. He may change some critics' opinion of him as a person, but it won't change what they think of the Catholic Church, because their real enemy is the Church and what it stands for, and part of their hostility to Benedict XVI is that he happens to be the leader of that Church today.]

People were asked to comment on whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements contained in the Pope’s third encyclical letter, Caritas in Veritate. Twelve representative statements, taken directly from the letter, were tested [without citing that they came from the Pope, though, and the source of statements does make a significant difference in polling responses!] and a significant majority agreed with 11 of them – from “Investment always has moral as well as economic significance” to “An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties”. A majority even agreed with Catholic teaching about sexuality: 63 per cent felt that it is “irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure”.

Ed Stourton, a lifelong Catholic and the BBC broadcaster who will anchor much of the Corporation’s coverage of the visit, is not surprised by these findings. “People are looking for an alternative to the moral relativism that has become the ideology of today. Benedict is one man who really challenges the status quo: the disillusioned can’t help but be drawn to his words.”

Here, then, is the challenge before the Pope: he must drag his message on the human condition out of the shadow cast by the child abuse scandals. It is a long shadow; but his is a worthwhile message.

[He faced that challenge before - in the US, in Australia, in Malta, in Portugal. And each time, he got his message through, if we are to judge alone by what and how the MSM themselves reported on those trips. One might have expected Ms. Odone to at least point that out!]

'Fatally Germanic'



I love it.

I've actually been fatally Germanic myself many times, without even thinking about it!
But it's not only negative!! It works great at airports when you wait in line and people are bugging you by bumping into you constantly or are sort of regarding you as a piece of meat.
All you need to do is take out your cell phone and start a conversation in German - people instantly back off; then, you use a demanding, commanding tone, and you'll definitely have your peace!!
It works every time!!

Surely, the fatally Germanic version of the Pope is a different version, but also very intimidating for the average Brit (who still believes that Germans are all Nazis).
Here we have a German Professor (bad enough already) who's intellect is gigantic, who is very reserved, courageous and determined; combined with the 'Nazi factor', his accent and deep, solid Catholicism, he's nearly intolerable.

I wish he was back in Rome already.



Thanks for picking up on that 'fatally Germanic' remark, Heike! And for being so good-humored about it. I was rushing to make a 2 pm appointment earlier today and did not have the time to review my post at all - and that I missed reacting to that remark!

But even Odone herself should have reacted in the article to what I can only describe charitably as a British anti-German reflex, but which really comes down to a most anachronistic and condemnable xenophobic chauvinism. Almost on the order of the Sarkozy adviser Alain Minc who said last week the Pope as a German was the last person who should criticize France's treatment of Romanian gypsies! As if all Germans have forever forfeited their human right to express themselves because of what the Nazis did.

The fact that few in MSM have even reported Minc's despicable comments, much less condemned them, indicates that MSM and all the bleeding-heart liberals have a most selective sense of what to be outraged about and for whom! Outrage, yes, to almost anything Benedict XVI says or does, but no outrage - and not even deemed newsworthy - for an offense against him that, if it had been done to any other world leader, would have fuelled human rights/free expression crusades for the next few months. Outrage about sex abuses committed by priests against children, yes, but not against the far greater preponderance of sexual abuses committed by other sectors of society.

And as much as I dread the thought of what other barbarities the Pope's enemies in the UK will unleash, this is a mission he must undertake, and that he obviously wants to undertake - for the beleaguered Catholics of the UK, to confirm them in their faith; for John Henry Newman and the shining example and standard that he set for his fellow Britons and the rest of the Christian world to emulate.

After all....



GOD BLESS AND KEEP WATCH OVER OUR BELOVED GERMAN SHEPHERD!

Vatican says it is in touch
with Iran over stoning case



CASTEL GANDOLFO, Sept. 5 Italy (AFP) – The Vatican said on Sunday it was in contact with Tehran over the case of an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery amid a global diplomatic push for clemency.

The Vatican said it was using "diplomatic channels" to intervene in the case, while Italy urged Iran for a "act of clemency".

Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, is facing the death penalty after being convicted of having an extramarital relationship in a case that has sparked an international campaign for her release.

"The Holy See is following this affair with attention and commitment," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement issued in response to journalists' questions on the matter.

"The position of the Church, opposed to the death penalty, is known and stoning is a particularly brutal form," he said.

Intervention by the head of the Roman Catholic Church on humanitarian questions takes place through diplomatic channels, and this sort of action has been taken a number of times in the past, the statement said.

Pope Benedict XVI did not make any mention of the case at the traditional Angelus blessing on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Sunday called on Tehran to grant clemency in the case, the ANSA news agency reported.

While reiterating his "full respect for Iranian sovereignty," Frattini said "only an act of clemency could save the life of this person."

He added that contacts had taken place with the Iranian embassy in Rome.

Frattini also recently said he had arranged to meet his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki on the sidelines of the forthcoming UN General Assembly in New York.

The plight of Mohammadi-Ashtiani, who was also convicted of being an accomplice in her husband's death, which she has denied, has caused a global uproar.

Tehran meanwhile has provisionally suspended the death sentence.

On Saturday, Mohammadi-Ashtiani's son Sajjad said she had also been sentenced to 99 lashes for a photo of her without a headscarf published in a British newspaper.

A French petition has been signed by two former French presidents and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

A hardline Iranian newspaper branded Bruni-Sarkozy a prostitute for signing the petition, with the French government describing the slur as "unacceptable".

France has urged the European Union to threaten new sanctions against the Iranian regime over the stoning case, while EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said talks were taking place with Tehran.

Mohammadi-Ashtiani's son called on the international community to continue the campaign, and appealed to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to use his country's ties with Iran to assist in her release.

Lula has already tried in vain to convince Iran to let Mohammadi-Ashtiani take asylum in Brazil instead of being executed.

The Guardian editors must be patting themselves on the back for coming up with what they must believe to be a 'rational', 'sane' and 'balanced' editorial stand on the Pope's visit. But just because they defend his trip as a state visit - a defense that he does not need, thank you, because he is, after all, the invitee, whose visit was solicited by the previous UK government - does not at all make up for the shameless ad hominem attack that precedes that 'defense'. Nor does their acknowledgment that perhaps not even the President of the United States could attract as many crowds as the Pope does.

In effect, they're saying, "He's really a big big gun, so as much as we dislike him and his Church, we have no choice but to pay attention". After all, people only aim to cut down the tallest tree in the forest.

And yet, they are shamelessly dishonest because not a single point they attack him on, personally, and then projected onto the Church, is based on fact - and that, indeed, the very opposite of what they claim can be proven with an abundance of facts and figures.... The impending avalanche of outright lying, ill will, bad faith and odium is just gathering force. I suspect much of what will be coming out between now and Sept. 19 will be destined for the toxic waste bin...


Papal visit:
Bad tripper, good trip
There are powerful arguments against Benedict XVI's visit –
but the head of the Catholic church is a force that cannot be ignored
Editorial

Monday 6 September 2010

The Vatican is no ordinary state, and the Pope's trip to Britain this month will be no ordinary state visit. No other leader who comes to these shores takes time out between the official meetings and dinners to conduct a beatification, as Benedict XVI plans to do.

None, probably not even the President of the United States, would expect to draw the same crowds, attract the same adulation [What? didn't the Guardian join everybody in hailing Obama as the Messiah two years ago???? And now they acknowledge the Pope is a greater draw????] – or stir the same resentment. It will be a big deal. The gathering storm over the cost of £10m or so to the taxpayer needs to be placed in that context.

Proselytising atheists are encouraging public resentment against the expense of policing the Pope's visit, and yet the same gang are inflaming these costs by suggesting that they will try to arrest him. The financial argument is a distraction, a mere veil for deeply held feelings about whether or not it is right for Whitehall to roll out the red carpet for the world's greatest theocrat.

[A label erroneously used for the Pope, because the Vatican as a state is no theocracy - 'a form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the state's supreme civil ruler, or in a higher sense, a form of government in which a state is governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided': The Pope's function as head of Vatican state is a civilian political necessity that is 'ex officio' to being the Pope - one that he holds because he is Pope - but it has nothing to do with his spiritual role as the Vicar of Christ and Successor to Peter. Likewise, his spiritual leadership of the world's Catholics does not have the all-encompassing authority that true theocrats like Iran's council of ayatollahs exert over all Iranians.]

The following paragraphs shown in purple are extremely offensive for their deliberate distortion of facts and outright mendacity:

The moral case against Benedict is powerful – and persuasive. For all the admirable work against poverty that Roman Catholicism inspires around the world, the Church directly aggravates the plight of vulnerable people. [EXCUSE ME! What moral case against Benedict? And how has the Church directly aggravated the plight of vulnerable people? By not giving condoms to people who trust Church workers enough to go to them for help about AIDS, rather than to the proliferation of do-gooding deluded 'only condoms can prevent AIDS' secular organizations in Africa and Asia???? What, for instance, has the Guardian and its sanctimonious pontificators ever done to improve the plight of vulnerable people???? Have they ever raised funds to help a single victim of a sex-abusive priest or the greater number of victims of sexual abuses committed by preponderant others who do not happen to be Catholic priests????]

It rails against IVF giving children to the childless, against stem-cell research giving hope to the sick, and against the use of condoms – even as a means of preventing the spread of HIV.

[Lie, lie and lie! 1) About IVF, the Church does allow one form of it, GIFT OR ZIFT, and just because it does not allow all forms of IVF does not mean some Catholics don't go ahead and do as they please anyway: the Church can only indicate, it cannot impose! 2) the Church does not oppose all stem-cell research, only when embryos are used for research - it is, in fact, encouraging and even funding adult stem-cell research. 3) There are other ways of fighting AIDS that have to proven to be more effective but do involve discipline and reining in the sexual-freedom-at-any-cost principle that is so sacrosanct to liberals!]

Its rigid views on homosexuality and the role of women are not unique in world religion, or even within Christianity, but the extent of child abuse for which its priests have been responsible has been shocking, as has its tendency to close ranks in response to the scandal. [This is blatant falsehood, rank exaggeration by any measure of the so-called 'extent of child abuse for which its priests have been responsible', and a deliberate denial of documented facts.]

Benedict himself, an arch-conservative, has in the past manoeuvred to preserve the autonomy of the Church in such matters, as opposed to having them immediately handed on to the police. [That is a clear lie, and a deliberate misreading of instructions referring to canonical handling of offenses - instructions that never ruled out reporting to the police in any way, but do not state this explicitly because such a step has nothing to do with canonical procedures

He has also indulged the standing of Catholic figures who have turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities. [Figures? Did Richard Williamson suddenly multiply himself? Another deliberate mis-statement of fact by the Guardian, aggravated by an utter lack of logic in the other statements: Lifting Williamson's excommunication, which had nothing to do with his personal historical opinions, is in no way 'indulging his standing', whatever that means, nor 'turning a blind eye to Nazi atrocities'. The Guardian is really also trying to insinuate all over what the UK media have always tried to pin on Joseph Ratzinger - that he must have been a Nazi because he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth and the German armed forces.]

A case against Benedict, however, is not the same thing as a case against allowing him a state visit. All manner of tyrants have been welcomed to London over the years, and – to take one example – the human rights record of China, which is uniformly dismal where the Vatican's is mixed, was no bar to President Hu Jintao enjoying a grand trip in 2005.

Purists would make a stand against flattering thuggery in all circumstances, but most of the rationalistic punters protesting against the Pope's visit would accept that peace and prosperity often rely on dealing with power as we find it, as opposed to power as we might like it to be.

[In the above arguments, the Guardian, in effect, equates the Pope to tyrants and thugs who have been state visitors to the UK!]

The argument then comes down to claiming that the Vatican is not a proper state, a point recently run by the philosopher AC Grayling, who speculated on what treatment world leaders would give him if he declared his south London garden a nation.

There is, perhaps, an echo here of Stalin's contemptuous question about how many divisions the Pope had. As a matter of fact the Pope is a head of state, one that conducts diplomatic relations with 178 capitals around the world.

As a matter of what foreign-affairs wonks label soft power, he is a force that cannot be ignored. The spiritual leader of a billion people around the world is, for better or worse, somebody with clout.

The Catholic Church flexed malign muscle within our own politics a few years ago by forcing Labour ministers to drop a scheme that would have encouraged a measure of religious mixing in faith schools. But it has been a force for good, too, in securing the writing-down of poor countries' debt, and is increasingly a useful voice on climate change.

London is right to recognise that the Pope is in a better position to protect the Brazilian rainforest than the Foreign Office.

The Pope could come in a purely pastoral as opposed to diplomatic capacity, as his predecessor did in 1982. Even so, the last Pontiff's arrival was said to have coincided with brief restraint in the Falklands war, and the truth this time is that there is serious diplomacy to do. Unattractive as the holy visitor is in so many respects, his trip is wholly justified.

[I am unable to come up just now with any statement that is strong enough to condemn that last sentence and the hateful and hate-full arrogance of the Guardian editors.]


An English priest who is spending a sabbatical year in a Michigan parish contributes this from his blog 'Caritas in veritate':


BBC Profile on Pope Benedict XVI


www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tk7s9/Profile_Pope_Bened...

---

Typical BBC 'objectivity': plenty of airtime to Hans Kung plus a sister from 'Future Church' who says the Pope is too concerned with a narrow vision of the Church, preserving it as it was or is and not thinking of where it needs to be, ruled as it is by a small number of men in Rome. The Pope has managed to offend Muslims, Jews and the Archbishop of Canterbury, says the BBC.

Joseph Fessio, a former pupil of Ratzinger's and founder and editor of the utterly reliable publishing house Ignatius Press however says what his professor taught was wonderful. Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, sounding ever more ancient, says the Pope will want to tell the people of Britain about a coherent truth that is good not just for Catholics but for everyone.

---

I listened to the 15-minute audio clip, and though I couldn't make up some parts of it, it is a typical 'show of objectivity' which mentions facts that are quickly embroidered by negative opinion. Such as that the five-year-old Joseph Ratzinger's admiration for a visiting cardinal lives on his 'love of fashion and finery' exemplified by... TA-DA! the fact that he has used the camuro and the saturno (both of which happen to be utilitarian head gear that protect against cold and heat, respectively).... Someone at the start quotes Benedict XVI wrongly, describing the moment when it appeared he would be elected as 'I felt the noose tightening around my neck' when the new Pope actually used a much stronger metaphor, "I felt like the guillotine was coming down on me"...

John Allen, described as 'the Pope's biographer' [though he is only one of many who have written biographies of Benedict XVI, most of whom have never even talked to him but depended on secondary and tertiary sources], actually gets more air time than Hans Kueng. He is good when he says that he does not doubt Joseph Ratzinger's attitude towards priestly sex offenses: "I've interviewed him - it is horrifying to him, you can see revulsion on his face", but then he goes on to say that the Hullerman case in Munich is 'the most serious blotch' on the Pope's record, because, he claims, the buck stopped at his desk insofar as the assignment of Hullerman to pastoral duties went. The BBC narrative never makes the timeline clear about Hullerman and makes it appear that his assignment to pastoral duties and his eventual recidivism all took place under Joseph Ratzinger, citing the New York Times as its authority for its 'facts'!

As for Hans Kueng, the BBC reporter goes along with his demand for a 'personal apology' from the Pope - but for what exactly, neithEr Kueng nor the reporter say. For Hullerman????

The nun they use as a resource person is as hateful as the worst of the Vatican-II nuns (yes, I am very biased and uncharitable about feminist ideologues and liberal activists whose minds are closed to reason and logic, and I find the Joan Chittisters of the world as insupportable as the worst of Catholic dissidents, but that's just me!).

Very likely, Hans Kueng really does not mind that MSM openly uses him as their Star Witness to impugn Joseph Ratzinger - it's probably the only use they have for him now. Sort of like getting Salieri to testify against Mozart, except that Kueng has really fed more poison about Joseph Ratzinger than any poison, real or imagined, that Salieri could have used against Mozart - if only because Kueng has been at it for at least four decades now!

Imagine the persons today whose reputations are largely based on their instant, reflex and most uncharitable opinions of anything Joseph Ratzinger says or does - types like Thomas Reese and David Gibson, to name just two who consistently do their worst to impugn Benedict XVI, and in a way, live off his reflected glory in a truly self-serving but perverse manner! After all, who would remember Salieri today if Mozart was not who he was?

P.S. It just occurred to me - if my conjecture is right that the apparent urgency the Holy Father gave to granting the interviews with Peter Seewald and getting the book to print before the end of the year is his way of directly answering all the manifold wide-ranging attacks against him while setting the record straight about the first five years of his Pontificate - then we may all get to learn from him directly 'what he knew and when knew it' about the Hullerman case. I cannot imagine Seewald would let that question pass, and perhaps more likely, the Pope himself may have wanted to clear that up once and for all... And John Allen will have his questions answered about this 'most serious blotch' on Joseph Ratzinger's record.

Two days ago, Sandro Magister came out with an article he rather extravagantly subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Pontificate', to which my first reaction was that the phrase would appear to be tailormade for the Pope's new interview book with Peter Seewald. I did not rush to post it because after all, most Benaddicts would have seen it and read it already, and because it took off from the Rodari-Tornielli book and its conclusions.

Magister's twist is to pick out statements made by Benedict XVI himself in the past several months that have to do with these attacks against the Church, and to relate these statements to the declared priority of this pontificate: to bring back God to the world.

Today, he has a new article that picks out the 'autobiographical' content in the Holy Father's Message for World Youth Day 2011 (which I have read about five time now in its English translation and twice in the Italian, because it is one of those messages where I can almost hear him speak the words directly to me, so conversational and naturally fluid does he express himself, like an ideal father figure or grandfather transmitting his wisdom).... So I will post both Magister articles together. I am not too happy about his melodramatic titles, especially this first one - it sounds too egocentric and one cannot imagine Joseph Ratzinger every expressing himself that way!



'Why they are attacking me':
Autobiography of a Pontificate
Ever since he was elected Pope, Joseph Ratzinger
has been the target of a crescendo of assaults,
from inside and outside the Church.
Here's how the Pope sees and explains it




ROME, September 3, 2010 – Two books have been released this summer, in the United States and in Italy, that reconstruct and analyze the merciless attacks on Benedict XVI from various sides, since the beginning of his pontificate, with a crescendo that reached its peak this year.

The book by Gregory Erlandson and Matthew Bunson, editors of Catholic publications very widely read in the United States, focuses on the scandal of sexual abuse by the clergy.

The book by the Italian vaticanistas Paolo Rodari and Andrea Tornielli extends the analysis to a dozen episodes involving actions or statements by Benedict XVI: from the lecture in Regensburg to the liberalization of the traditional Mass, from lifting the excommunication of the Lefebvrist bishops to his statement on the problem of using condoms to prevent AIDS, from welcoming Anglicans into the Catholic Church to the scandal of pedophilia.

Rodari and Tornielli provide a highly detailed reconstruction of each of these episodes, including some previously unknown background information.

Their conclusion is that three different attacks are under way against Benedict XVI, carried out by three different sets of enemies.

The first and main enemy is external - public opinion fomented by centers of power hostile to the Church and to this Pope.

The second enemy are Catholics – including not a few priests and bishops – who see Benedict XVI as an obstacle to their project of 'modernizing' the Church.

And the third enemy are officials in the Vatican curia who hurt the Pope instead of helping him, because of their incompetence, ignorance or even opposition.

These three fronts obviously do not seem to be commanded by a single general. [Nor necessarily by a 'general' on each front!] But this does not rule out a unifying reason that would explain such bitter and constant attacks concentrated on the current Pope.

This is what Rodari and Tornielli do in the last chapter of their book, collecting the opinions of various analysts and commentators.
[But from the final chapter excerpt Il Foglio published - and which I translated on Page 131 of this thread - they give no conclusion, leaving each of their resource persons to their individual conjectures. Except for the hoity-toity and self-righteous Rachel Donadio of the New York Times, everyone agrees that there is a massive attack against the Pope but that it is not a campaign because it is not organized.

It may not be organized, without a formal command structure, but it certainly is systematic and near-unanimous, which makes it a campaign, insofar as a herd mentality rules the MSM and they generally tend to agree, day in and day out, expliitly or implicitly, on what their 'narrative of the day' will be about their pet polemic.

The best answer one can glean about why Benedict is so set upon is that he does not conform to the dominant thinking and ways of the world - and the unspoken consequence is that the papacy as an institution, and Benedict himself, with his formidable intellect and undisputed personal holiness (the Hullerman case is really the only 'blotch' anyone has cast on his life] is truly an extraordinary personality, even among that most exclusive club of Popes, even in one-on-one comparison with his great predecessor - and that therefore, both Jack and the beanstalk (the Church) have to be brought down at any cost. Giant-killer is a fantasy that has titllated every newsman since Woodward and Bernstein, and the Pope is a far greater target than any President of the United States or any other secular leader one can think of.]

But it is no less important to know how Benedict XVI himself interprets the attacks brought against him.

In the homily at the concluding Mass of the Year for Priests, last June 11, Benedict XVI referred to an 'enemy' as follows:

---

It was to be expected that this new radiance of the priesthood would not be pleasing to the 'enemy'; he would have rather preferred to see it disappear, so that God would ultimately be driven out of the world.

And so it happened that, in this very year of joy for the sacrament of the priesthood, the sins of priests came to light – particularly the abuse of the little ones, in which the priesthood, whose task is to manifest God’s concern for our good, turns into its very opposite.

---

In this case, the enemy the Pope means is obviously Satan. But we all know Satan takes many forms...]

And this is what the Pope said at the beginning of his trip to Fatima, last April 11:

---

The attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from outside[...] The greatest persecution of the Church arises from sin within the Church, and the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification.

---

Benedict XVI thuis makes clear that for him, even the annus horribilus of 2010 must be lived as a year of grace, because it provides the occasion for purification and renewal.

For him, the tribulation produced by sin is the common condition of mankind in need of salvation. A salvation that comes only from God, and is offered in the Church through the sacraments administered by the priests.

Because of this, the Pope points out, rejection of God coincides so often with an attack on the priesthood and the trait that most distinguishes it in public, celibacy.

Last June 10, on the eve of the closing of the Year for Priests, Benedict XVI said that celibacy is an anticipation "of the world of the resurrection... (the sign) that God exists, that God matters in my life, that I can base my life on Christ, on the future life."

Thus, he continued, elibacy "is a great scandal", not only for today's world, "in which God does not matter", but even for Christians when "God's future is no longer considered, and the now of this world alone seems sufficient."

Papa Ratzinger has said repeatedly that "making God present in this world" is the priority of his Pontificate, particularly in the memorable letter he addressed to the bishops of the whole world in March 2009.

Linking the question of God to the priesthood and priestly celibacy is not a usual association, but Benedict XVI does this constantly.

For example, at the end of 2006, making an assessment of his trip to Germany that had made an impression because of his lecture in Regensburg, after emphasizing that "the great problem of the West is forgetfulness of God," he continued by saying that "this is the central task of the priesthood: to bring God to men." But the priest "can do this only if he himself comes from God, if he lives with and from God." And celibacy is a sign of this full dedication:

"Our world, which has become totally positivistic, in which God appears at best as a hypothesis but not as a concrete reality, needs to rest on God in the most concrete and radical way possible. It needs a witness to God that lies in the decision to welcome God as a land where one finds one's own existence."

It is therefore no surprise that, just before his election as Pope, Ratzinger called for a reform of the Church that would begin with purifying God's ministers of "filth."

It is no surprise that he conceived and proclaimed a Year for Priests intended to lead the clergy to a holy life.

It is no surprise that the liturgy is so central to this pontificate. The priest lives for the liturgy. It is the priest that God "has enabled to set God’s table for men, to give them his body and his blood, to offer them the precious gift of his very presence."

Restoring full legitimacy to the traditional Mass, lifting the excommunication for the Lefebvrist bishops, welcoming traditional Anglicans disaffected with their Church's liberalizing trends - they are all part of the plan to bring God back to the world. [And on the secular side, Joseph Ratzinger's virtual one-man Crusade to re-Christianize Europe, broadening the idea of mission from places that have ner known the Gospel to places that have chosen to forget the Gospel.]

There is a mysterious lucidity of vision [There's a reason that the arch-rebel angel was called Luficer!] that seems to 'unify' the attacks on the current pontificate. Like an "invisible hand" at work and hidden from the attackers themselves. A mind that sees Benedict XVI's basic plan, and therefore does all it can to oppose it. [And Benedict quickly named him 'the enemy', a traditional term for Satan.]

In the Gospel of Mark, there is a "messianic secret" that accompanies the life of Jesus and remains hidden from his own disciples. But not from the "enemy." The devil is the one who recognizes Jesus immediately as the savior Messiah.

The paradox of today's attacks on the Church is that, even as they are intended to reduce it to impotence and silence, they reveal its essence, as the privileged home of the God who forgives.

"Seraphic Doctor" is the nickname of Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, one of the first successors of Saint Francis as head of the order he founded. It could also be applied to Benedict XVI, for how he is guiding the Church through the storm.

In the catechesis he dedicated last March 10 to this saint – whom he studied extensively as a young theologian – Papa Ratzinger also spoke his mind about his "enemies" within the Church.

To those who, discontented, demand a radical palingenesis [transformation] of the Church, a new spiritual Christianity reduced to the naked Gospel with no more hierarchies or precepts or dogmas, Benedict XVI noted that it's a short step from spiritualism to anarchy.

The Church "is always a Church of sinners, and (nonetheless) always a place of grace." It progresses and evolves, but always in continuity with tradition.

To those who think Church reform is entirely a question of new command structures and new commanders, he points out, following Bonaventure, "governing is not simply an activity, but above all thinking and praying": which means "guiding and enlightening souls, directing them to Christ."

The attacks that are focused on Pope Benedict prove to him the magnitude of the wager he proposes to man today, even non-believers: to live as if God exists,


For his Sept. 6 article, Magister follows up with an even more melodramatic title, 'Confessions of a young Ratzinger', which is really misleading because they are rather 'The Pope's reflections from his youth'.... Obviously, I'm not a fan of soap-operatic titles. In this case, The Pope's statements were not 'confessions', first of all, because he is not revealing anything negative, and secondly, nor is he saying aything new - he has said these things before in other ways. All he did was to make these life experiences directly relevant to the young people he is addressing.


Benedict XVI offers reflections
from his youth in 2011 WYD message



ROME, September 6, 2010 – "Autobiography of a pontificate" was the title of the previous article from www.chiesa. By a curious coincidence, on the same day that article was published, Benedict XVI released a message unusually rich in autobiographical details.

It is the message for the World Youth Day that will be held in Madrid in August of 2011. It is a text clearly written by the Pope himself, a concise summary of his vision for the Church. From the loss of God to God who makes himself near again in Jesus. A Jesus whom it is possible to "touch" in the sacraments of the Church.

It is a text that demands to be read in its entirety. But to begin with, here are the three passages in which Papa Ratzinger talks about himself, about his childhood during Nazism and the war, about the blossoming of his vocation to the priesthood, about the birth of the idea of writing a book about Jesus: "almost to help to see, hear, touch the Lord."

NAZISM AND THE WAR

---

[...] In thinking of my own youth, I realize that stability and security are not the questions that most occupy the minds of young people. True enough, it is important to have a job and thus to have firm ground beneath our feet, yet the years of our youth are also a time when we are seeking to get the most out of life.

When I think back on that time, I remember above all that we were not willing to settle for a conventional middle-class life. We wanted something great, something new. We wanted to discover life itself, in all its grandeur and beauty.

Naturally, part of that was due to the times we lived in. During the Nazi dictatorship and the war, we were, so to speak, “hemmed in” by the dominant power structure. So we wanted to break out into the open, to experience the whole range of human possibilities.

I think that, to some extent, this urge to break out of the ordinary is present in every generation. Part of being young is desiring something beyond everyday life and a secure job, a yearning for something really truly greater.

Is this simply an empty dream that fades away as we become older? No! Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough. Saint Augustine was right when he said “our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you”...

---

THE CALL TO PRIESTHOOD

---

There is a moment, when we are young, when each of us wonders: what meaning does my life have? What purpose and direction should I give to it? This is a very important moment, and it can worry us, perhaps for some time. We start wondering about the kind of work we should take up, the kind of relationships we should establish, the friendships we should cultivate...

Here, once more, I think of my own youth. I was somehow aware quite early on that the Lord wanted me to be a priest. Then later, after the war, when I was in the seminary and at university on the way towards that goal, I had to recapture that certainty.

I had to ask myself: is this really the path I was meant to take? Is this really God’s will for me? Will I be able to remain faithful to him and completely at his service? A decision like this demands a certain struggle. It cannot be otherwise.

But then came the certainty: this is the right thing! Yes, the Lord wants me, and he will give me strength. If I listen to him and walk with him, I become truly myself. What counts is not the fulfilment of my desires, but of his will. In this way life becomes authentic...

---

WHY HE WROTE 'JESUS OF NAZARETH'

---

In the Gospel we find a description of the Apostle Thomas’s experience of faith when he accepted the mystery of the Cross and resurrection of Christ.

Thomas was one of the twelve Apostles. He followed Jesus and was an eyewitness of his healings and miracles. He listened to his words, and he experienced dismay at Jesus’S death. That Easter evening when the Lord appeared to the disciples, Thomas was not present. When he was told that Jesus was alive and had shown himself, Thomas stated: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25).

We too want to be able to see Jesus, to speak with him and to feel his presence even more powerfully. For many people today, it has become difficult to approach Jesus. There are so many images of Jesus in circulation which, while claiming to be scientific, detract from his greatness and the uniqueness of his person.

That is why, after many years of study and reflection, I thought of sharing something of my own personal encounter with Jesus by writing a book. It was a way to help others see, hear and touch the Lord in whom God came to us in order to make himself known.

Jesus himself, when he appeared again to his disciples a week later, said to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (Jn 20:27).

We too can have tangible contact with Jesus and put our hand, so to speak, upon the signs of his Passion, the signs of his love. It is in the sacraments that he draws particularly near to us and gives himself to us.

Dear young people, learn to “see” and to “meet” Jesus in the Eucharist, where he is present and close to us, and even becomes food for our journey. In the sacrament of Penance the Lord reveals his mercy and always grants us his forgiveness. Recognize and serve Jesus in the poor, the sick, and in our brothers and sisters who are in difficulty and in need of help...

---

The attacks on the Pope show
this Papacy is 'explosive'
Translated from

Sept. 2, 2010


Vacation over, things are back to usual in the media. The Pope speaks about something noble like 'universal brotherhood' and the media reduce it to 'a severe admonition directed at [French President'] Sarkozy'. Are we surprised?

[Mastroianni wrote this before the Pope's WYD 2011 message was released, so he has not factored in how the MSM in Italy trivialized it - to the point that the Pope himself decided to summarize its main points in his Angelus message yesterday - much less how the Anglophone MSM have so far virtually ignored it. However, I must point out once more that Mastroianni uncannily anticipated one of the themes of the message in his 8/31 opinion column for TEMPI. which was about how Benedict XVI challenges the faithful 'to desire great things'..]

The same thing happened to the Fox News interview with Mons. Scicluna, promoter of justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about his work on sexual abuse cases presented against priests and the attention Cardinal Ratzinger gave to these cases.

Did anyone see the Scicluna interview reported anywhere in those spaces which just a few months ago pullulated with stories about predator sharks in priest's robes?

And yet, Scicluna makes clear in that interview the lucid and shattering views Cardinal Ratzinger always had on the question of priestly abuses. "Of course, it is a crisis for the Church," Scicluna said. "But it is also an opportunity - an occasion to look at 'sin' in the face and to do something about it. It is an opportunity for the Church to show its determination in fighting sin and crime among its own ministers".



it will be interesting then to read the book ATTACCO A RATZINGER by Paolo Rodari and Andrea Tornielli (Piemme, 2010, 320 pp, 18 euro), in which the two Vaticanistas examine the causes and motivations that led to a profusion of misunderstanding and misrepresentation about this Papacy which, as the text says, "from one controversy to the next, have resulted in 'anesthetizing' the message of Benedict XVI and crushing him with the cliche of a retrograde Pope, and thus depotentiating its importance".*

But what spontaneously came to mind for us was this: Is this process of defusing [the attack bombs against the Pope] not a confirmation of the 'conflagration' represented by Papa Ratzinger who is leaving his indelible marks on history?


Mastroianni's last thought is almost a re-statement of the conclusion drawn by Le Figaro's religion editor, Jean Guenois, in the Rodari-Tornielli book. Thinking outside the box, he sees the Pope as the one who continually attacks all the commonplaces of contemporary thought that constitute the raison d'etre for the MSM and their secular/liberal ilk (including those within the Church) - and that the attacks against him are their reaction.

Extrapolating Guenois's argument, one might describe the over-the-top counter-offensive of the Pope's enemies as a survival reflex. Except that where Benedict XVI fights with words of reason and faith, they resort to unreason, bad faith and hitting below the belt.

But in terms of the Rodari-Tornielli 'conclusion' that all the polemics about the Pope have resulted in 'anesthesizing' and 'depotentiating' his message, I wish to reiterate my skepticism that this is necessarily so. IMHO, such a conclusion represents the narrow, almost 'elitist', view peculiar to those who live with these stories too closely.

It does not necessarily reflect the attitude of the regular faithful - particularly those whose faith does not swing and sway according to the winds of opinion - whose thinking, I think, is the great omission from this book. I have obviously not read the book yet, but I have not seen a single review that indicates the authors had sampled the views of ordinary folk on this issue. My suggestion had been that they could have used testimonials from those who came to the Papa Day rally at St. Peter's Square last May and from the readers who write Avvenire for a broader spectrum pro and con.


This brings me to a short article by Sandro Magister published by L'Espresso, the magazine he writes for [where his wwww.chiesa articles first appear], on April 22 this year, at the peak of the anti-Benedict furor. It was Magister's rejoinder to the cover story that featured an interview by another L'Espresso writer with lay theologian Vito Mancuso, a man Magister has previously described as someone determined to rewrite all of Church theology by himself, and who is currently La Repubblica's house theologian (in an illusory world where publisher Eugenio Scalfari is Pope!).


L'Espresso cover, 4/22/10.

For some strange reason, Magister never used the article in the www.chiesa series, and even more odd, I failed to post it on this Forum although I had translated it. It's one of Magister's most powerful short pieces in praise of Benedict XVI. I came across the translation while I was cleaning up some Word files just now, and its current resonances are amazing. Not to mention the cover photo for L'Espresso which resembles that of the Rodari-Tornielli book, as does the title of the cover article, Scacco al Papa (Checkmating the Pope), referring to Mancuso's outre presumptions...



The enigma of Benedict
by Sandro Magister
Translated from



ROME, April 22 - He landed in Malta with the barque of the Church in a raging tempest. And he found himself welcomed by festive crowds that exceeded all expectations.

The enigma of Benedict XVI's Pontificate also lies in this: His 14 trips abroad as Pope have always upset dark predictions before each of them - especially to places which are considered 'tough'. The United States and France in 2008, Israel and Jordan the following year.

At lunch with the cardinals to mark the fifth anniversary of his Pontificate, the Pope quoted St. Augustine: "I am a pilgrim among the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God".

The enigma of Benedict XVI is that he is attacked precisely where the facts prove he is right. In the years when everyone - inside the Church and outside - were blind to the scandal of priests who sexually violated minors, Joseph Ratzinger was the only highly placed Church leader who had the foresight to sense the seriousness of the scandal and to impose effective counter-measures.

Today, when so many are casting stones against him, it is once again he who preaches that it is not enough for the Church to bring all concerned to earthly justice - because what is right in the Church is the order of grace, which goes beyond laws, and signifies "doing penance, to acknowledge what is wrong, to open up to forgiveness, thus allowing self-transformation".

No Pope in modern times before him has decreed that an entire national Church carry out public penitence for the sins of its members, as Benedict XVI did in March with the Church in Ireland.

The gentle Benedict XVI will pass into history for his words and actions of great daring.

With his lecture in Regensburg, he laid open the ground in which the ultimate roots of religious violence are found - namely, the idea of God mutilated by rationality. Thanks to that lecture, moderate Muslims today have found their voice to invoke a revolution of enlightenment within Islam, such as the Catholic Church underwent in recent centuries.

Benedict XVI is a great 'enlightener' in an age when few respect the truth, and doubt is dominant.

He asks modern man to broaden the space of reason and not to limit it merely to data that is measurable by science. It is his idea to open up a modern-day 'court of the Gentiles' where everyone may meet in the shadow of God, even those who do not know God. It is he who has always proposed to the men of our time to "live as if God existed', because, as Pascal said, 'There is everything to gain and nothing to lose" by doing so.

Several weeks ago, during one of his Wednesday catecheses to pilgrims [his catecheses on St. Bonaventure] , Benedict XVI compared the present moment of the Church to the time that immediately followed that of St. Francis of Assisi. Then, too, there were currents in Christianity [Joachim di Fiore and his followers] invoking ‘an age of the Spirit’, a new Church that would no longer have hierarchies or dogmas.

Something similar is happening today when, riding the wave of accusations that aim to overwhelm the Church, some are calling for a Vatican III as a ‘new beginning and rupture’. Pressing further, advocates of this fantasy Council believe it would lead to the abolition of priestly celibacy, ordination of women, liberalization of sexual morals, and more democracy in the governance of the Church.

The very same things that, once realized in some of the Protestant churches, have failed to produce any regeneration at all. Indeed, as one can see with the Church of England, they have instead generated robust currents of migration towards the Church of Rome as the only port of certainty.

To the spiritualist utopia which leads to anarchy, Pope Benedict opposes an art of governance in terms of Bonaventure’s formula, ‘thought illuminated by prayer’. To a world wanting in faith, he speaks of God and Jesus.

When he became Pope, he said precisely that this was what he wanted to do: “To make the light of Christ shine on men and women today, not my light, but that of Christ” (April 22, 2005).


For those interested in a background on Mancuso, Magister had a comprehensive feature on him in February 2008:
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/189243?eng=y
What the article does not mention is that Mancuso was a priest, who earned his doctorate in theology, summa cum laude, from the Lateran University no less, but shortly after that, got a papal dispensation in the mid-1990s to leave the priesthood and get married.

Monday, Sept. 6, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

BLESSED CLAUDIO GRANZOTTO (Italy, 1900-1947), Franciscan priest, Sculptor
Born to a peasant family near Venice, Claudio was the youngest of nine children and grew up
doing hard work in the fields. At age 15, he was drafted into the Italian army, where he served
more than three years. His artistic abilities, especially in sculpture, led to studies at Venice’s
Academy of Fine Arts, which awarded him a diploma with the highest marks in 1929. Even then
he was especially interested in religious art. When Claudio entered the Friars Minor four years
later, his parish priest wrote, "The Order is receiving not only an artist but a saint." Prayer,
charity to the poor and artistic work characterized his life, which was cut short by a brain tumor.
He died on the feast of the Assumption and was beatified in 1994.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090610.shtml


No OR today.


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with
- Bishops of Brazil (Northeast Sector III, Group 3) on ad-limina visit.

Thanks to Lella's blog for this item from an online Italian news journal whose name 5W, is based on the famous 5 essentials of a news story - who, what, when, where, why.


Mozart's Requiem to be performed
for Benedict XVI in CG tomorrow

9/6/10




PADUA - The Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, under conductor Claudio Desderi, the Coro Accademia della Voce di Torino and four soloists will perform Mozart's Requiem (K 626) for the Holy Father at Castel Gandolfo tomorrow.

The event is under the auspices of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which is offering it as a homage to Benedict XVI on the first five years of his Pontificate.

In its 45 years of existence, the Orchestra has played all over Europe, but will be playing for a Pope for the first time.

The soloists will be Chiara Giudice, soprano; Silvia Regazzo, mezzo-soprano; Francesco Marsiglia, tenor; and Maurizio Franceschetti, bass.

"The invitation to play for the Holy Father is a profound honor," says Filippo Juvarra, artistic director of the OPV, "and we are particularly happy to pay homage to him with the music of Mozart. Not only is he the Pope's favorite composer, but he has also been central to the life of our orchestra since the years when we were under the musical direction of Peter Maag. Performing yet another time with a great conductor like Claudio Desderi, who has led the OPV in other Mozart concerts before, makes the occasion even more special."

After the concert, the Pope will have a special audience for a delegation from the city of Padua and representatives of various musical associations who are part of the project.

[Written in 1791, the Requiem, or Mass in D Minor, was Mozart's last composition, but he died before completing it. Franz Xavier Sussmayr, who had worked with him, completed the work as it has been known since then. But since the 1970s, some contemporary composers, dissatisfied with the 'Sussmayr completion', have attempted their own versions of 'completing' Mozart's unfinished work.

Scotland's Cardinal O'Brien appears to be someone who likes to take the bull by the horns. After the controversy he caused last month by his remarks that the United States had no business lecturing the Scottish government over its release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber from Libya over an apparently false medical report that he was dying of terminal cancer (I thought his comments were out of place myself, and worse, uncalled for), this time he's taken on the BBC.

Scottish cardinal accuses BBC
of 'anti-Christian' bias
Britain’s most senior Catholic has accused the BBC
of harbouring an institutional bias against
“Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular”
By Heidi Blake

Sept. 6, 2010

Cardinal Keith O’Brien says the BBC’s news coverage is contaminated by “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset”.

The Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh said the corporation’s intolerance of religion is equivalent to its “massive” political bias against the Conservatives in the 1980s.

He also accused the corporation of plotting a “hatchet job” on the Vatican in a documentary about clerical sex abuse on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.

Cardinal O’Brien believes that atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins are given a disproportionate amount of airtime while mainstream Christian views are marginalised.

He is also angered by a 15 per cent slump in religious programming over the past 20 years and believes the broadcaster should appoint a religion editor to address the decline.

He said: “This week the BBC’s director general [Mark Thompson] admitted that the corporation had displayed ‘massive bias’ in its political coverage throughout the 1980s, acknowledging the existence of an institutional political bias.”

“Our detailed research into BBC news coverage of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, together with a systematic analysis of output by the Catholic church, has revealed a consistent anti-Christian institutional bias.”

He added that insiders at the BBC had privately admitted that there is a cultural intolerance of Christianity at the corporation.

“Senior news managers have admitted to the Catholic church that a radically secular and socially liberal mindset pervades their newsrooms.

“This sadly taints BBC news and current affairs coverage of religious issues, particularly matters of Christian beliefs.”

Cardinal O’Brien joined calls by the Church of England for the BBC to appoint a religion editor to spearhead the corporation’s coverage of faith issues.

The Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester and the Church of England’s lead spokesman on communications, made the request last month in a submission to the BBC Trust’s ongoing review of BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 7.

He wrote: "We see no logical distinction between the genre of arts, science and business (all of which include reflecting and discerning between different opinions and perspectives, and have BBC editors) and that of religion.”

Cardinal O’Brien also voiced fears that the broadcaster will use a forthcoming documentary called Benedict: Trials of a Pope to humiliate the Pontiff on the eve of his visit to Britain. [Does he have any doubt of that at all? The BBC's 2006 anti-Ratzinger documentary was a preview of just how barbaric and slanderously unfair they can be!]

The programme, which charts the clerical child abuse crisis that has dogged the Catholic church, has been made by Mark Dowd, a homosexual former Dominican friar. It will be aired on September 15. [Elementary decency and simple good faith would have counseled the BBC to choose a neutral producer for such a documentary, not someone with multiple axes to grind against the Church! But then, their lead documentary maker for their 2006 slander spree was Ireland's most militant anti-Church activist for having been a sex abuse victim hismelf. Journalistic objectivity is not possible with such lethally loaded dice, and the BBC knows it, but it obviously had no intentions of objectivity in these two documentaries - as in many other things dating back to the Vietnam War, when the BBC ceased to be the institution it was in World War II!]

Senior Catholic figures have suggested that the Pope could meet with victims of abuse by Roman Catholic priests when he visits Britain later this month.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols told BBC1’s Andrew Marr show yesterday: "The pattern of his last five or six visits has been that he has met victims of abuse.

"But the rules are very clear, that is done without any pre-announcement, it is done in private and it is done confidentially, which is quite right and proper so I think we have to wait and see.”

The BBC dismissed Cardinal O’Brien’s criticism of its religious coverage and denied that it had marginalised mainstream religious issues, which it said were placed “at the heart” of its schedule.

A spokeswoman said: “The BBC’s commitment to religious broadcasting is unequivocal. BBC news and current affairs has a dedicated religion correspondent, and works closely with BBC Religion, ensuring topical religious and ethical affairs stories are featured across all BBC networks.”

In response to the Cardinal's attack on the forthcoming documentary by Mr Dowd, she said: "Mark is just one presenter in a range of programming that will include live news and events coverage of the visit itself, and other documentaries across radio and TV."


Earlier city officials of Glasgow, which will host a Papal Mass in its Bellahouston Park, had estimated income from the Pope's 3-hour stay to bring in at least 7-million pounds in revenue... The point is that a major event like the Pope's visit which will draw people to the places where he goes always generates tourist income for the host cities, but not one of all the hundreds of stories that have been filed so far about the costs of the papal visit to the government has ever pointed this out, Glasgow and now Edingurgh have been man enough to say so. When will London and Birmingham own up????

Pope's visit could mean
£4m tourist windfall
for City of Edinburgh
by Ian Swanson

06 September 2010


THE Pope's visit to Edinburgh is set to give the city a multi-million pound economic boost, officials are predicting,

With up to 100,000 people expected to flock to the Capital to see the Pontiff, Scottish Government economists calculate the city could benefit by up to £4 million from overnight stays and visitors spending money in shops and restaurants.

And on top of the immediate rewards, city leaders believe TV pictures of the Pope in Edinburgh beamed around the world will bring a longer-term return in increased tourism.

Pope Benedict XVI is due to fly in to Edinburgh Airport on September 16 at the start of his official four-day visit to the UK.

The Evening News revealed last month that preparations for the visit could cost the city council up to £400,000 and there will be unspecified policing costs on top of that.

But calculations suggest the Capital stands to gain financially from the occasion.

After his arrival at the airport, Benedict will go directly to the Palace of Holyroodhouse for a meeting with the Queen before being driven through the city in a Popemobile to the home of Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of Scotland's Catholics, in Morningside.

Sources in the Catholic Church say it is impossible to guess how many people will line the streets to see the Pope. One insider said: "It's a weekday when people are working. No one really knows how many will turn out."

But no one doubts there will be an influx of Catholics from across the land to see the Pope pass along Princes Street.

And the economists worked out that if there are around 100,000 extra people here that would mean a boost for the city of between £3.25m and £4m.

A source in the Catholic Church in Scotland said: "These figures are an estimate - though we reckon a pretty good estimate - of the mini-economic windfall the Pope's visit will bring to the city.

"While for Catholics pounds shillings and pence is not the important reason for the visit of Pope Benedict, it does nip in the bud any suggestion that somehow the Pope's visit is not a good deal for the taxpayers of Edinburgh or Scotland.

"The fact is, this will be a fantastic day that everyone can share in and enjoy.

Part of the Pope's Mass
in Glasgow will be in Latin
by Cate Devine

Sept. 6, 2010

A substantial part of the Mass to be celebrated by Pope Benedict at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on September 16 will be said in Latin, the Vatican has confirmed.

In an interview with The Herald, published today, Monsignor Guido Marini, the Pope’s master of ceremonies, reveals the Canon and Preface – the most significant parts – will be said in the ancient language.

Mgr Marini said: “For all the Masses said in the UK the Preface and the Canon will be said in Latin. What the Holy Father intends by using Latin is to emphasise the universality of the faith and the continuity of the Church.”

The Canon is the most significant part of the Mass as it both precedes and follows the Consecration. It will be said in a Latin translation of the modern English liturgy, and will be viewed as a sign of Benedict XVI’s desire to return to the solemnity of the traditional liturgy.

[What the interviewer fails to mention - and if she is someone who was casually assigned to this story without requiring some preparation, she probably would have no idea of it at all - is that for some time now, the Canon and Preface, not to mention the Pater Noster, are recited in Latin in all of the Pope's 'international' Masses, i.e., those with an international audience, not just abroad but even at the Vatican. And so it will be during the UK visit for all his Masses. Since the Vatican has been posting the trip Missals integrally online, all you have to do is check out the published texts. The Pope has also encouraged praying the Pater Noster in Latin even at the General Audiences, where the text is flashed on the jumbo screens and also found now, I believe, in the ticket or pass.]

Mgr Marini also revealed a new English translation of the Mass, to be introduced next year, will be truer to the original Latin used by the Church for 1500 years before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Parts of it will be said at Bellahouston for the first time.

But the move [which is already SOP for papal Masses with an itnernational audience] falls short of a wholehearted return to the old Tridentine rite of pre-Vatican II, supported by Pope Benedict, but which remains controversial. [Obviously, the reporter was completely unprepared for this story, or she would have known some Latin usedin the Novus Ordo is something other than the use of Latin altogether in teh traditional Mass.]

Earlier this year news of the papal visit to the UK sparked debate about the unity of the church in Scotland as it was claimed some Scottish bishops opposed returning to the old pre-1970s liturgy. [No one is being asked to 'return' to the traditional liturgy! Otherwise, the Pope hismelf would be celebrating it openly and constantly now!]

Yesterday Father Stephen Dunn, parish priest of Sacred Heart church in Bridgeton, responded to the news by saying he is moving his regular Latin Mass from Monday evening slot to Tuesdays at 10am from this week.

“I’m doing this because it is in accordance with the wishes of the Holy Father,” he said. “I am delighted that the Holy Father is once again using liturgical Latin. It was never banned but has been discouraged.”

But Scottish composer James MacMillan, who has set parts of the new English verion to music for the Bellahouston Mass, dismissed any idea of controversy.

“Vatican II was never intended to do away with Mass in Latin,” he said. “Contrary to what certain activists are trying to claim, neither Latin nor choral music have ever been banned.”

Ronnie Convery, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, said: “It is possible the Latin liturgy at Bellahouston may reawaken a renewed interest in the Church’s traditional music forms. We are completely relaxed about it, and support it.”


Yesterday, Damian Thompson posted on his blog - in what he may believe to be a pre-emptive move - that he has been told Mons. Marini will not get to have the seven candles and Crucifix on the altar in Bellahouston as Pope Benedict had re-introduced them to the Novus Ordo altar three years ago. I cannot personally imagine any of the organizers in Scotland descending to this level of pettiness, but it's Thompson's typically provocative way - not loath to exaggerate to make his point - of lighting the fire under the seats of prelates in the UK who he thinks have indulged their liberal preferences and defied the Pope for far too long...

The other incidental news this weekend is that Tony Blair's spokesman bluntly said "No' when asked whether the former Prime Minister, now a Catholic, had given any personal contribution to the Church for the Pope's trip. Of course, he is under no obligation to cotnribute anything, but perhaps Blair's conscience will be prodded to do soemething about it. Even a token 1000 pounds would mean something from a man who has announced he is donating the 4.6-million-pound advance for his memoir A Journey and any royalties from it to the Royal British Legion, a UK charity which provides support and assistance to UK servicemen and ex-servicemen. His detractors, who cannot forgive him for joining George Bush in the Iraq war, have already called his goodwill gesture 'blood money', and he had to cancel a London booksigning today to spare the government any expense in providing police ans security against his detractors who got nasty in Dublin this weekend.


The following is definitely a legitimate news report, but it's just one of the many anti-Benedict 'thumbing the nose' items in today's Guardian - in addition to the offensive pro-visit-but-anti-Benedict editorial I posted earlier on this page. Never mind that, insofar as the headline of this item goes, countless journalists have already bit the dust predicting over and over about Benedict, against all evidence to the contrary, that he cannot possibly match John Paul II's 'act' in any way (not that he tries to - he's completely his own man, sui generis, a living Doctor of the Church).

Yet his critics have absurdly closed their minds to the possibility that any institution, let alone the Catholic Church, could have two great leaders in succession - as if it were inconceivable that if the preceding Pope was great and extraordinary, his successor could be great and extraordinary, too! If they would just open their eyes and minds... Although the terms of comparison are not all that analogous, if the anti-Benedict journalists had lived in the time of John Henry Newman, they probably would not have seen his greatness at all.


John Paul II will be
a hard act to follow
by Martin Wainwright

Sept. 6, 2010

Whatever the challenges facing Pope Benedict XVI in Britain next week, they pale in comparison with 1982.

Pope John Paul II flew in at 8 o'clock on a bright May morning to a country at war in the Falklands, with casualties overnight against the troops of Argentina, an overwhelmingly Catholic country. [So??? Surely, the Brits were not blaming the Vatican for the war just because Argentina happens to be a Catholic country!]

Almost to the wire, no one outside the Vatican knew whether the visit was actually going to happen. Vincent Malone, now retired auxiliary archbishop of Liverpool, sat through a health and safety meeting, expecting a message from Rome that would call the whole thing off.

However, the charismatic "Polish pope" was determined to become the first serving Pontiff to visit the island that had turned its back on Rome nearly 500 years earlier. [In the same way that Benedict XVI wishes to visit his flock in a near-apostate land after 28 years, and beatify the first potential British saint since the 17th century.]

John Paul had sprung the idea a year before, in a video link to the Catholic national pastoral congress in Liverpool. The timing was perfect for the Anglican church and other denominations fired up with ecumenical vigour.

After kissing the runway at Gatwick in front of 3,500 singing children, and scooping up a 12-year-old with cerebral palsy in his arms, he met their expectations in full.

On the first day alone, he departed from his prepared text three times, to call for peace in the Falklands, and in Northern Ireland - whose struggles were represented throughout the visit by protesters from Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian church.

But, as the Guardian's then churches correspondent, Martyn Halsall, puts it today: "That was an expression of the fundamental Christian ideal of peace. It transcended politics."

The nitty-gritty of the visit lay elsewhere. "John Paul had clearly been very well briefed about the relative liberalism of English Catholics on social issues," says Halsall.

As the 62-year-old pope toured nine cities in six days, delivering 16 major addresses and drawing vast, sunny-natured crowds, he put the tenets of his faith into a contemporary, British context.

"One veteran observer even floated the idea that this was a new pope – Jean Paul III," says Halsall. Especially significant was a visit to Canterbury and an embrace with its archbishop, Robert Runcie - a see and its holder whose status the Vatican did not officially recognise.

The first Pope from outside Italy since the 15th century, John Paul had some of the Anglophilia of many Poles. Among the most enthusiastic of crowds were Polish communities settled in Britain. He addressed them in their own language on three occasions.

More widely, John Paul spoke with the eloquence of an actor and poet - both part of his CV - of his delight in being the country's guest. He called himself the "bishop of Rome" - a phrase used slightingly by Henry VIII - and met the Queen (although not the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher - the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Casaroli, did the talking with her).

Halsall singles out three especially striking occasions, one related to the Falklands specifically, the other two with resonances for all humanity. "It was extremely moving when he appealed for peace at Coventry cathedral, drawing on the new church amid the ruins of its blitzed predecessor.

"Then, his relationship with young people at the youth service in Cardiff was pure charisma.

"And when he moved among the elderly, ill and dying at a special service in London, he became a simple priest, doing the fundamental work of his calling."

The crowds posed problems every bit as expensive as those in preparation for Benedict. Logistics were often horrendous; and security at Coventry alone cost £2.65m at today's prices. A perimeter fence at Glasgow, where Protestant bands played Orange songs at a small counter-rally, cost £160,000. Six Free Presbyterian ministers, arrested on the first day for alleged public order offences, were released on bail only after the Pope's aircraft had lifted off for Rome.

There were disappointments, too. Security fears and excessive hype saw the crowd at Heaton Park in Manchester fall to 200,000 instead of the predicted million. In an ironic reversal of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, one stallholder threw away £2,000 worth of unwanted burgers, sausages and chips.

But overall, everyone was satisfied and extremely relieved, even though the Falklands war continued unabated and fundamental issues between the churches were not resolved.

One of the last, and most lasting, images was John Paul's gentle teasing of the youth rally, saying twice that he had to return to Rome, which prompted, with stylish timing, huge cries of "No". He hoped to come back, he said, but that was not to be.

Soon his successor arrives instead.

---

What did the Pope do in 1982?

Fri 28 May Meets Queen; Mass for 3,000 at Westminster cathedral; ministry to 4,000 elderly, sick and dying at St George's, Southwark. Modest crowds watch popemobile pass.

Sat 29 May Service with archbishop Robert Runcie in Canterbury cathedral; Mass for 60,000 at old Wembley stadium.

Sun 30 May Mass for 25,000 British Poles at Crystal Palace; 350,000 welcome him to Coventry; visits both Liverpool cathedrals, where there were an estimated million people on streets and at services.

Mon 31 May Meets Manchester Jewish community, 200,000 at Mass; 210,000 in York; 44,000 teenagers in Edinburgh.

Tue 1 June Meets Scottish Protestant church leaders; 250,000 turn out at Glasgow (biggest religious service ever held in Scotland), where there are minor protests.

Wed 2 June Mass for 100,000 in Cardiff; youth rally of 37,000; leaves for Rome.

---

The wisdom of Popes
Editorial
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Translated from the 9/6-9/7/10 issue of





Speaking of Leo XIII on the bicentennial of his birth, his current successor explained the task of every Pope (and 'of every pastor of the Church'): to transmit 'wisdom' to the faithful.

Wisdom not as abstract truths, but as a message that unites 'faith and life, truth and concrete reality'.

Indeed, it does not suffice to repropose doctrines which to many may appear remote from the problems of existence - one must do so with constant attention to the historical context: in faithfulness to tradition and 'measuring up to the great questions that remain open".

As that Pontiff did, "aged, but wise and far-sighted', who ushered into the 20th century a rejuvenated Church capable of facing unprecedented challenges.

Of Papa Pecci, "a man of great faith and profound devotion", Benedict XVI wished to underscore first of all his religious side, in general hardly referred to, but which "always remains the basis of everything, for every Christian, including the Pope".

Indeed, Benedict's re-reading of Leo XIII's life and work had many points of great interest: references not just to Rerum novarum but to the entire social magisterium of his predecessor, which became the organic foundation of Catholic social doctrine.

Benedict XVI summarized this in the expression "Christian brotherhood', which, not by chance, was the subject of the young Joseph Ratzinger's first published monograph (Die christliche Brüderlichkeit), after his theses on Augustine and Bonaventure.

The novelty of Christianity eventually led to the abolition of slavery - already nullified by the Apostle Paul, and also the subject of Papa Pecci's encyclical Catholicae Ecclesiae - as well as to overcoming "other barriers between men that still exist", with the evangelical images of the seed and yeast, manifested in various societies by 'the beneficial and peaceful forces for profound change' that Christians have represented.

Even in difficult circumstances, as the era that followed the revolutions of the 19th century and the Napoleonic upheavals, which Benedict XVI described in brief descriptive term:, including the multiple and reiterated attempts to eradicate every expression of Christian culture, the bitter anti-clericalism, the inflammatory manifestations against the Pope.

On the same day that he paid homage to his predecessor in these eloquent terms, the Pontiff st the Angelus prayers also decided to personally present his Message for the next World Youth Day to be held in Madrid in 2011.

The message, released by the Vatican in all its official languages the day before, had been ignored, misrepresented or misunderstood by all the media - news agencies, TV, radio, the newspapers.

In fact, the message contained many examples of the papal wisdom that the Pope had described in Carpineto as characteristic of papal teachings - what he described as a combination of "faith and life, truth and concrete reality".

And so, in a culture that is "indecisive about its fundamental values", the Pope once more pointed to the personal encounter with Christ as the definitive experience, sustained by the faith of the entire Church.

There is no sense "in claiming to eliminate God in order to make man live", Benedict XVI said in a message that was impassioned and full of personal testimonials: from recalling World Youth Day in Sydney to the distant days of his youth when, during the years of 'asphyxiation' by by Nazi tyranny, he and his generation also desired to go beyond 'the normality of middle-class life' through the encounter with Christ.

The message for WYD 2011 is almost a personal letter written with the inexhaustible passion of a Christian life. And with the wisdom of one who has truly encountered Jesus.


Enthusiastic reception by
Papa Pecci's townmates
for Benedict XVI
by Nicola Gori
Translated from the 9/6-9/7/10 issue of






The police barriers could not hold back the people who lined the narrow and steep streets of Carpineto Romano as Benedict XVI in his Popemobile passed through on Sunday morning.

Others were hanging out their windows, standing on balconies or on any raised terrain to greet the Pope who had come to their town on Monte Lepini to pay homage to the Pope who laid the basis for the social doctrine of the Church, Leo XIII. The occasion is the bicentennial year of his birth as Vincenzo Goacchino Pecci in Carpineto in the ancestral home of the Counts of Pecci, on March 2, 1810.




The Popemobile took the Pope from the helifield where he arrived from Castel Gandolfo to the main piazza on the Largo dei Monte Lepini. BenedictX VI was welcomed by the Bishop of Angagni-Alatri, Mons. Lorenzo Loppa, who would later recall the preceding visits of Paul VI in 1965 and John Paul II in 1991 to celebrate, respectively, the 75th and 100th anniversary of the encyclical Rerum novarum.



"The faces of everyone speak for themselves," he said. "They express our joy to once again have the Successor of Peter in our midst. to be confirmed in our faith and to receive the gift of a more solid hope".

"Papa Pecci," Mons. Loppa said, "was an intrepid pastor, who prepared to confront the 'new' which was fast advancing, to confront modernity which was knocking at the door, without pronouncing anathemas, but with firmness of principle, clarity of thought and above all, a good dose of kindness towards the society of his time which was a world in tumultuous transformation".

Mayor Quirino Briganti, in welcoming the Pope, underscored the affectionate ties that kept Papa Pecci close to his hometown. "He was a great man who never forgot this land with its sub-Alpine peaks and slopes, all of which he scaled familiarly in the years of his youth. On Monte Lepini, he found the Arcadian world where peasants and shepherds have lived for centuries in dignified poverty - and who probably inspired his most famous encyclical".

Recalling Leo XIII's Magisterium Briganti said "the innovative and pioneering power of Papa Pecci's social teachings have reached the third millennium intact... He was likewise firm in his farsighted conviction that the ecumenical path can contribute to bring peace among peoples".


After the formal greetings, Pope Benedict XVI vested for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, along with Cardinal Agostino Valli, his Vicar for Rome, 18 bishops of the Lazio region, and numerous priests from the diocese.

At the end of the Mass, the Pontiff paid homage to the image of the Immacolata, patron of Carpineto, which occupied a place of honor on the altar built for the Mass.

For the visit, Benedict XVI wore a gold pectoral cross decorated with gems that had been given to Leo XIII by an anonymous donor. In turn, Papa Pecci gave the cross to Mons. Giuseppe Sarto, when he was the Bishop of Mantua, who brought it with him to the Vatican when he was elected Pope Pius X to succeed Leo XIII in 1903.

The Diocese of Anagni-Alasri and the parish of Carpineto presented Benedict XVI with a gold medallion bearing the image of Leo XIII on one face, and the words 'Anno bicentenario 1810-2010', and on the reverse side, a relief of the collegiate church of the Sacred Heart. An inscription on the case reads, "A sign of the filial devotion of the Diocese of Anagni-Alatri'.

The commune of Carpineto also presented the Pope with a commemorative medallion of the Leonine Year, bearing the logo of the bicentennial on the front, and on the back the coat of arms of Leo XIII.

It is rare even in Italy that one place is so intimately linked to a Pope. In Carpineto, almost everything reminds you of Leo XIII. From the building where he was born, to the parish church where he was baptized, to the college that he endowed.

During his Pontificate, so many social works inspired by his magisterium were started: an orphanage and children's asylum, a girls' school, a hospice for the aged, adn teh civilian hospital.

Papa Pecci's encyclicals on Marian devotion, especially the rosary, continue to inspire enthusiasm among the faithful. The parish priest says that most families in Carpineto still pray the rosary together in the evening.

Leo XIII also began the first public lighting by acetylene gas and later by electricity in Carpineto, as well as a water system that brought spring water from neighboring Monte Carpino.

To commemorate the latter event, Papa Pecci commissioned two artistic fountains from a Sicilian sculptor. In recognition of all his gifts to the town, his townmates placed markers and named streets and places for him. A marble bust in the collegiate church was given a place of honor in the altar stage used by Benedict XVI.



The Holy Father arrived by helicopter from Castel Gandolfo at the Galeotti sports field. In his party were Archbishops Fernando Filoni, deputy Secretary of State, and James Harvey, Prefect of the Pontifical Household; Mons. Paolo de Nicolo, his regent; Mons. Georg Gaenswein, the Pope's secretary; Dr. Patrizio Polisca, Fr. Ciro Benedettini, deputy press director; and our editor.

Welcoming the Pontiff were Archbishop Giuseppe Bertello, Apostolic Nuncio in Italy; Mons. Loppa; and don Giuseppe Ghirelli, parish priest of Carpineto. Civilian authorities were led by Gianni Letta, undersecretary in Prime Minister Berlusconi's cabinet; Antonio Zanardi Landi, Italy's ambassador to the Holy See; Renata Polverini, president of Lazio region; Nicola Zingaretti, president of the Province of Rome; Mayor Briganti of CArpineto; and Giuseppe Pcoraro, Prefect of Rome.

Tuesday, Sept. 7, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

BLESSED ANTOINE-FREDERIC OZANAM (b Milan 1813, d Marseilles 1853)
Husband and Father, Professor and Writer, Founder of St. Vincent de Paul Society
Born in Milan to French parents, Frederic studied law at the Sorbonne, where his faith was often challenged. To back up his defense of it
by deeds, he and his friends started visiting the poor in Paris tenements to help them out as best they could. This was the nucleus for the
charitable Society of St. Vincent de Paul which he founded as a lay apostolate in 1833. In Paris, his circle included Chateaubriand and other
leaders of what was then a neo-Catholic movement. As a contributor to many periodicals even as a student, he also wrote books on literature
and sociology (after his death, his complete works were published in 11 volumes) came to be considered the leading historical and literary
critic in the neo-Catholic movement of this time - more learned, more sincere, and more logical than Chateaubriand. After receiving his
doctorates in law and in literature, he became a professor, first in Lyons then in Paris. In 1841, he married Amelie Soulacroix with whom
he had a daughter. His society was flourishing and he travelled throughout Europe to promote it. After the 1848 Revolution, the French
government asked the Society to supervise government aid to the poor, and Vincentians throughout Europe came to their aid. Frederic
started a newspaper promoting the cause of workers and the poor. He was always sickly, and in 1853, when he was just 40, he died of TB.
By then, his Society had more than 2,000 members. Today, it is a worldwide society with over 100,000 members whose councils are active
in most of the major cities of Europe and the United States. Frederic was beatified by John Paul II in ceremonies at Notre Dame de Paris
in 1997.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090710.shtml



OR for 9/6/-9/7/10:

Visiting Carpineto Romano, the Pope says Christians are a beneficial and peaceful force for radical change in society:
'Well-rooted in faith in Christ'
At the Angelus, he reminds the youth of the world that like trees, they need profound roots to grow properly and well

The issue provides a coverage of the Holy Father's pastoral visit to Carpineto Romano in homage to Leo XIII, and the Sunday Angelus in which he reiterated the core of his Message for World Youth Day 2011 released last week. Other Page 1 items: Rains in Guatemala cause flooding and deadly mudslides along the Pan-American Highway, and thousands homeless; and a puff piece on various Obama proposals to give the impression his administration is doing something about the stagnant economy.


THE POPE'S DAY
No official events scheduled for the Holy Father today, but at 5 p.m., he will be honored witb a performance
of Mozart's Requiem Mass by the Orchestra di Padova e della Veneto, a choir from Turin and four soloists -
an offering to the Pope by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to mark the first five years of his pontificate.

I suppose this article is an honest attempt to present a 'balanced' view of Benedict XVI, but it still perpetrates many half-truths and misconceptions about the Pope and the Church that reflect the most common errors of secular media and commentators, who mostly gaze at their navels and echo each other instead of doing honest research and fact-checking of their stereotypes... But this is probably the 'best' we can expect of the kind of information (much more misinformation and disinformation than it is information!) that the UK media are purveying about Benedict XVI between now and his visit.


Pope Benedict XVI:
Man with a mission
to keep the faith alive
By Stephen McGinty

Sept. 7, 2010


Iona, the little island off the coast of Mull, has a large place in the heart of Pope Benedict XVI. For it was here among the salt water and sea-spray that St Columba ensured the survival of Christianity in Europe during the Dark Ages.

So when Benedict XVI touches down at Edinburgh Airport next Thursday, he will be aware of the nation's role and anxious that Scotland's Catholics are prepared for the new 'Dark Age' to come.

Five years ago, when Joseph Ratzinger took off the scarlet robes of a cardinal and pulled on the white soutane of Pope he knew his advanced age could herald a short time as the successor to St Peter and so his goal was clear.

As his biographer [He is only one of at least a score of 'biographers' by now, and hardly a neutral biographer, much less the most authoritative] John L Allen explained: "His big picture aim is that he wants to equip Catholicism in the West to survive in an era of secularism. His diagnosis on how to do that is that you encourage, however small in number they may be, those Catholics who seem most on fire with the faith. The image he uses all the time is the Church as 'a creative minority'.

"The idea is to foster this numerically small but passionate form of living the Gospel, who will keep the light of the faith alive in an overwhelmingly secular world. That is the goal not just for Scotland and the UK but for the entire Pontificate."

Yet it is a message he has struggled to get across. If John Paul II was a global and charismatic rock star, never happier than when his sermons were interrupted by the cheers of the faithful, Benedict XVI is a quiet professor who frets that those who cheer aren't listening to the words he speaks. The media, however, are only too willing to note each controversial statement and they have not lacked for copy.

In September 2006 during a speech in Regensburg he triggered protests among Muslims by appearing to link Muhammad with violence, while three years later on the Papal plane en route to Africa he said condoms were not the solution to AIDS but, in fact, make the problem worse. Then, there was his decision to lift the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, including one who has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers, and the appointment in Poland of a new Archbishop who was forced to resign after the revelation that he had collaborated with the Soviet authorities. [The usual yada-yada but a shorter list than the one John Allen habitually reels off...]

And yet nothing has damaged the Pope and the Catholic Church more than the issue of child sex abuse by priests. [That's the MSM take, and is not necessarily true for everyone,certainly not for Catholics who are solid in their faith.]

The cases may be largely historical and spread across various nations but the image of a Church more intent on protecting itself than innocent children, will take years to undo. [For as long as the dominant media and public opinion choose to see only the negative about this issue and ignore everything positive the Church has done, that 'image' will remain. The Church is less concerned about 'image' than reality.]

As Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with Church discipline [primarily doctrinal discipline, including crimes against the faith and the sacraments, and only since 2001, with sex abuse crimes by priests], Cardinal Ratzinger would listen as the testimony of victims was read out.

"The physical disgust you could see on Ratzinger's face," said an individual briefed by those who attended the meetings. "He would project an almost despair and a sense of disbelief that a priest could do that to someone."

In recent papal visits he has made time to speak in private to the victims of clerical sexual abuse, where he has prayed and wept with them. It is not yet known if he will have a similar meeting in London, but one will not take place in Scotland.

According to the Bishop of Paisley, Philip Tartaglia, a new hostility has flared up against the Church. "It seems to be now that there are people who genuinely hate the Church - not that they are against it, but hate it with an anger and a bitterness and even hate this Pope which is so astonishing when you are in the presence of his gentleness. He is very very gentle and maybe it's because he expresses himself so clearly, in ways that you can't misunderstand what he is saying. He is not the Superstar and perhaps people see him as vulnerable and they can have a right go."

Yet those who know him attest to a deep serenity that comes in thinking "in centuries" not in years.

For six years Monsignor Henry Docherty worked side by side with Josef Ratzinger in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and insists the reality was far from the media caricature of 'Cardinal Rottweiler' or the 'Panzer Cardinal', steam-rolling his plans through.

"He has a quiet, confident, diffident manner but has a brilliant mind," said Mgr Docherty, the retired secretary of Scotland's Bishop's Conference. "He was also humble, you would always see him walking across St Peter's Square in his black soutane and beret with a battered leather briefcase." Immediately on accepting the role, he defied public expectations by stating that after the papacy of John Paul the Great he was "but a humble worker".

He is also the first Pope to have belonged to the Hitler Youth. [What kind of a stupid statement is that? - There is no other Pope who happens to be German and lived under Nazism. After Mr. McGinty's efforts to be objective so far, that's an odd way to work in the UK bias that has cast the teenage Joseph Ratzinger's wartime conscription in the worst light possible!]

The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, he was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in the activities of Hitler's Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times. In 1937 his father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria. The young Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941, though he soon won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary.

As a Cardinal he said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile. His brother, Georg said upon his brother's election: "Resistance was truly impossible. But neither of us ever used a rifle against the enemy."

As a priest and theologian, Joseph Ratzinger gained attention as a liberal adviser during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The Marxism and atheism of the 1968 student protests that swept across Europe shocked him to the core. Students threw books at him as he tried to lecture and this prompted him to become increasingly conservative in an attempt to defend his faith against growing secularism. [Too bad McGinty simply reworks the stereotypes about Joseph Ratzinger as a liberal-turned-conservative instead of re-examining them in the light of documented facts.]

After periods as a theology professor and then archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor office to the Inquisition, in 1981.

In that office, he first turned his attention the "liberation theology" popular in Latin America, silencing controversial theologians such as Leonardo Boff. ['Liberation theology' was hardly his priority - it was one in a spectrum of doctrinal deviations on which a number of liberal theologians were lecturing and publishing books. And 'silencing' is a loaded word, when it is not explained that it consisted of asking him to refrain from public dissemination of his theology for a year - though Boff chose to leave the priesthood instead and eventually married.]

In 1986, he issued a firm Vatican denunciation of homosexuality and gay marriage.

He brought pressure in the 1990s against theologians, mostly in Asia, who saw non-Christian religions as part of God's plan for humanity. [There was only one theologian who was disciplined for that reason, and he was an American Jesuit, Pierre Dupuis, who wrote the book Towards a theology of religious pluralism. The statement also misrepresents what he was advocating: namely, that non-Christian religions are as valid for salvation as Christianity, which contradicts the very premise of Christianity. One Asian theologian, Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka, was disciplined for writing a book in which he misrepresented the doctrine of original sin and cast doubts about the divinity of Christ. After rejecting the discipline and being excommunicated by John Paul II, he eventually signed a profession of faith and was taken back into the Church.

What secular writers choose to ignore when reporting on theologians disciplined by the Church is that 1) these theologians' main teaching, or part of it, is clearly against the doctrine of the faith, and it is the CDF's main duty to defend that doctrine; 2) that the discipline has been, at most, to prohibit them from teaching Catholic theology in Catholic institutions - Hans Kueng is the best example of this. He has continued to write and publish as he pleases, only he can't teach Catholic theology. None of the other handful of theologians disciplined by the CDF in Cardinal Ratzinger's time has ever been banned from teaching elsewhere nor from publishing anything!!]

A 2004 document he [the CDF, not he personally] published also sternly denounced "radical feminism" as an ideology that undermined the family and obscured the natural differences between men and women.

During his long career he has condemned women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an "objective disorder". [Again, a major error, perhaps deliberate, by secular observers. The Church never condemns persons, only the sins they commit, and in the Church, all the categories mentioned by the writer commit specific sins (in the case of homosexuals, engaging in homosexual sex; because Catholic homosexuals who choose to remain chaste are not committing sin in this respect)]

He also upset many Jewish people with a statement he made in 1987 that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ, a position which was denounced by some as "theological anti-Semitism". [What was McGinty researching? This particularly objection is hardly ever brought up by anyone. The most scholarly Jews know it is a statement by a Christian that is logical for Christians to make and is not a diminution of Judaism in any way. In any case, the literature on Joseph Ratzinger's scholarship and appreciation of Judaism is voluminous, and in all the polemics over the past three years because of Pius XII and the Good Friday prayer, only the most radical ultra-Orthodox militants have ever accused him of anti-Semitism, theological or otherwise!]

He can also be otherworldly. When Benedict XVI returned to his native Germany shortly after his election, he was introduced to a man he did not know - despite the fact the other's fame arguably eclipsed his own. As one million young people gathered in a giant park in Cologne, to celebrate World Youth Day, the Pope peered at his guest and said: "Are you Brazilian?" It took an aide to lean over and enlighten him: "He's Pele. He's the world's greatest ever soccer player."

What Pope Benedict XVI may lack in knowledge of the beautiful game, he more than compensates for with his appreciation of beautiful things. He has been noted for his sense of style: he wears gold Gucci sunglasses and has an iPod nano.[All of this based on media myths!]

When his papal vestments proved too big for him, he had no hesitation in switching from Gammarelli, the clerical outfitters who have clothed every Pope since 1792, to a lesser-known tailor who made his vestments when he was a cardinal, causing something of an ungodly spat over the lace chasuble.
[What ungodly spat is he talking about? Gammarelli was miffed, but the Pope has a right to choose his tailor! BTW, chasubles are never made of lace, and in any case, the papal tailors only make cassocks and 'secular' accessories, not liturgical garments, which a chasuble is. That's the danger when your research - as McGinty's apparently is - is rather superficial and depends only on what the media has reported without independent verification of facts, nor for that matter, basic research about, in this case, papal garments!]

But what is apparent is that Pope Benedict has settled comfortably into the role despite the controversy. [To imagine that with his background and qualities, he would not 'settle comfortably' into any mission he has accepted from the Lord is not to have learned anything from his biography!]

He made a point of transferring all 5,000 of his books, which previously lined the walls of his small flat, into the grand papal apartments of the Vatican, and when asked if he wished to have a new piano he insisted on retaining his old one, on which he still continues to play for 15 minutes every day. [And McGinty cites this superficial item as the extent of his 'settling comfortably' into his role as Pope???]

While his last homily before entering the conclave that elected him was an attack on the forces of relativism that make up the modern world, his first encyclical, the official papal letters to the world, was about love.

In the opinion of Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of Scotland's Catholic Community this will be at the core of his message, one that is not restricted to the Catholic Community but to all Christians and people of faith.

He said: "I would like to think that the Pope's visit will give a great boost to Christianity in general, because there is so much of the Christian message that will come to all denominations. The Christians in Scotland who have had to carry their different crosses in various ways, to give them a boost to say your faith is important, your faith is worth living and there is all sorts of attacks going on because of secularism and atheism, but you have got your Christianity and so live your Christianity."

As John L Allen, a journalist with the National Catholic Reporter who has accompanied the Pope on many overseas trips said: "When he travels he tries to project the most positive and affirming message possible - I would expect him to in a few of these speeches to make pro-forma references to the gay rights issue and other issues but it is not going to be the top note. It will be him stressing over and over that the Catholic Church wants to be a constructive partner with British society."


Once, last April, Brendan O'Neill who founded and edits an online journal called Spiked!, wrote an excellent commentary on what he calls 'the secular Inquisition' in his country. The following article is a development of that idea - with even greater outrage against this breed of hate-mongering would-be tyrants. If only there could be more rational and fair intellectuals like him!


Turning the Pope into
an Antichrist for atheists
by Brendan O'Neill, Editor

7 September 2010


With just a week to go until Pope Benedict XVI arrives on British shores, the campaigning against his visit has become so shrill that soon only dogs will be able to hear it.

And the great irony of this allegedly rationalist protest against the Pope is that it is indulging in precisely the kind of demonology that the Catholic Church once excelled at. Campaigners have turned Benedict into a Satan for secularists, an Antichrist for atheists, against whom they desperately hope to define and advertise their own moral integrity.

As a radical humanist, I hold no candle for the Catholic Church (I held more than enough candles for it when I was an altar boy). But I also don’t like zealous moralism, the irrational demonisation of some Other for the benefit of the Self.

And the current baiting of all things popish stinks to the empty heavens of just that kind of campaigning. The anti-papists are ironically utilising the Torquemada-ish tools of intolerance and fearmongering to turn the Pope into a much-needed bête noire for their social set.

Pope-protesting seems increasingly unhinged. Pick up a copy of this month’s pope-bashing New Humanist and you will struggle to find either anything new (everyone from the English middle classes to the KKK to Ian Paisley has long considered the Pope of Rome to be evil incarnate) or very humanist.

Asked what she would say to the Pope if given half the chance, broadcaster and 'humanist' Claire Rayner says: ‘I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Alois Ratzinger. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature.’

Now, I like Claire Rayner, and respect her, but these sentiments sound more like the products of primal emotionalism than considered secularism. Rayner, it seems, has been struck dumb (‘I have no language’) by what she refers to as the Pope’s ‘disgusting, repellent and hugely damaging’ views.

"[T]he only thing to do is to get rid of him", she exclaims, and in the midst of an anti-Pope spread that compares Benedict to fascists and has cartoons showing him as a slobbering beastly midget perched on a throne, it’s not immediately clear whether she means kick him out of Britain or kill him.

Other humanists – seemingly forgetting the bit in humanism that promotes liberty and tolerance – say the Pope should be excluded from Britain.

‘You are not welcome’, says that pope of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins: ‘Go home to your tinpot Mussolini-concocted principality and don’t come back.’

Journalists Francis Wheen and Johann Hari both say that they would say to the Pope: ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.’ Geddit? They’re going to perform a citizens’ arrest on him! (Quite how citizens’ arrests – which were once seen as the tools of busybody ‘swivel-eyed gets’, in the words of Alan Sillitoe – came to be seen as radical gestures is beyond me.)

Where government ministers campaign to keep people like Snoop Dogg out of Britain, lest his drug-praising and ho-baiting turn Britons into carbon-copy gangstas, today’s New Atheists want to keep the Pope out in case his disgusting, repellent ideas turn Britons into anti-condom, Mary-worshipping hysterics.

The same prejudices that drive our illiberal rulers to erect a forcefield against undesirables also fuel the pseudo-liberal campaign against the arrival of the Pope.

A ‘comedian’ called Nick Doody says he wouldn’t say anything to the Pope – he’d simply put a condom over the pontiff’s head until he goes blue and dies. It’s meant to be funny (because the Pope says condoms are porous, you see!) but it isn’t of course. It does, however, provide a glimpse into the emotionally troubled mindsets of the anti-Pope lobby.

When they aren’t demanding that Britain be made a Pope-free zone – with scant humanist or tolerant regard for what that would mean for the six million Britons who follow the Catholic faith – the Benedict-bashers use the politics of fear to exaggerate the wicked works of the Catholic Church.

Now, I know and you know and everyone knows (in way too much eye-watering detail, thanks to the misery-memoir industry) that some Catholic priests sexually abused children. That is disgusting and where appropriate it should be punished.

But there is no justification for describing the Catholic Church as a ‘paedophile ring’, which carried out ‘systematic rape and torture’, giving rise to a palpable ‘stench of evil’. You don’t have to be a friend of the Vatican – and I am not – to be able to state categorically that that is top-notch bullshit.

Once again echoing the tactics of our illiberal rulers, the New Atheists are deploying the politics of scaremongering in order to present their opponents as stinking of evil and themselves as purer than pure.

This has nothing to do with principled secularism, and instead echoes the US and UK governments’ transformation of someone like Saddam Hussein into a creature ‘worse than Hitler’ in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Indeed, the New Atheists also evoke the moral absolute of the Holocaust as part of their campaign to paint the Pope as an uncivilised, non-Guardian-reading brute, reminding us at every opportunity that he was once a member of the Hitler Youth.

And of course, no fear-driven campaign of demonisation would be complete without double standards. Some are criticising Queen Elizabeth II for agreeing to meet the Pope, saying he is an illegitimate state leader and potentially a criminal. I’ll just wait a second while that sinks in.

Yes, Britain’s unelected queen, whose armies have wreaked all sorts of mayhem around the world during her 57 years contracting piles on the throne [That's really rude, quite crass, and uncalled for to say about the Queen, no matter how you dislike or disagree with her!] is being called on to snub Mr Ratzinger. At least he was elected by smoke-making cardinals.

In their rush to get their rocks off by posturing against the Pope, the anti-papists implicitly and uncritically bolster Britain’s own, frequently warped political and moral systems.

Of course people should be free to say whatever they like about the Pope and to protest against him to their hearts’ content. As the editor of a magazine that has argued vociferously against blasphemy laws and religious hatred legislation, I strongly believe that no religion or religious leader should be given legal protection from criticism, ridicule and even bad gags by Nick Doody.

But let’s at least be honest about what the current outbreak of feverish pope-bashing in polite British society represents – not true humanism or intellectual secularism and certainly not Enlightened tolerance, but something like their opposite: a screechy, oftentimes weird attempt to turn one man into a catch-all demon for the secularist middle classes.

These Pope-protesters threaten to drain the last drop of decency from old-fashioned humanism, turning a once-principled outlook into little more than a requirement to hate religion. Yet from Marx to Darwin, the great non-believers of old had little interest in bashing religions or demonising their leaders, believing, in Darwin’s words, that ‘freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds’.

Today it is a powerful sense of lack within modern-day so-called humanist circles – a feeling of directionless and soullessness – that leads them to invent religious demons against which they might posture and pontificate.

That is why they talk in such religious tones (ironically) about the Catholic Church’s ‘clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel’ – because this is about cynically cobbling together some sense of their own goodness and mission.

And in the irony to end all ironies, they make use of the very religious tools that secularists once hoped to supersede with reason – intolerance, fear-stoking, demonology – as part of their self-serving campaign.


A comment on O'Neill's article comes from CATHOLIC VOICES, the group of Catholic laymen assembled by the Church of England and Wales a few months earlier to present the Church viewpoint and respond to attacks on the Church and the Pope:
In studies of mob behaviour, it is well documented that angry crowds project their own fears and tensions onto a scapegoat (a "demon"), in order to reassure themselves that they are "good" and the other "bad".

It happens, especially, when the people that make up the crowd are insecure, anxious and disunited -- as O'Neill observes of the humanists ("a feeling of directionlessness and soullessness). Once the mob disperses, of course, everyone comes to their senses. And feels a little embarrassed.

O'Neill is a true humanist -- and a friend to other humanists -- to warn them about this.


The above comes from a Media Monitor blog opened by CATHOLIC voices last Sunday, Sept. 5 - basically a limited edition of what PROTECT THE POPE has been doing since late July.
catholicvoicesmedia.blogspot.com/
The obvious question is why VOICES did not start this blog as soon as it was constituted last April instead of waiting until 11 days before the visit begins! It would have centralized their efforts and provided blanket coverage of all visit-related/Church-related items for the convenience of interested readers. Their individual efforts were targeted at specific media, often a single one, and one came across it only if it happened to be reported by that target itself! And yet, some of these VOICES are probably among those Catholics who criticize the communications deficiencies of the Vatican...

It turns out that Brendan O'Neill wrote an equally excellent commentary in Spiked! on March 29, not long after the Pope's letetr to the Irish Catholics, and following the first New York Times and AP scandal-baiting personal attacks on Benedict XVI. It is by far the best commentary I have read, Catholic or otherwise, on the sex abuse issue in general. Its analysis is evidence-based, well-researched, and in the broad context of today/s culture. I am sorry I missed it at the time - surprisingly, it seems few in the Catholic blogosphere noticed it either - because it ought to be framed, and e-mailed to every newsdesk and journalist on the face of the earth, not just for its substance but as an example of objectivity! Yes, Virginia, even in today's world, it is possible - and highly desirable in a newsman - to be objective


Why humanists shouldn’t join
in this Catholic-bashing
The reaction to the paedophile priest scandal is as guilty of scaremongering,
illiberalism and elitism as the Catholic Church has ever been
by Brendan O'Neill, Editor

March 29, 2010


With all the newspaper headlines about predatory paedophiles in smocks, terrified altar boys and cover-ups by officials at the Vatican, it is hard to think of anything worse right now than a sexually abusive priest.

Yet today’s reaction to those allegations of sexual abuse is also deeply problematic. For it is a reaction informed more by prejudice and illiberalism than by anything resembling a principled secularism, and one which also threatens to harm individuals, families, society and liberty.

When considering the problem of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, it is important to distinguish between the incidents themselves, some of which were of course horrific, and the way in which those incidents are understood in today’s political and cultural climate.

The acts of sexual abuse themselves were no doubt a product of various problematic factors: the Catholic Church’s culture of celibacy, its strange views on sex, the fact that in some institutions priests were given ultimate authority over young boys and girls. [This is about the only non-objective statement I could spot in the whole article.]

But the way in which those acts are understood today – as supremely damaging to individuals and the inevitable consequence of people ‘deciding it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith’ – is powerfully informed by two problematic contemporary trends: the backward cult of victimhood and the dominant ‘new atheist’ prejudice against any institution with strong beliefs.

With all the current claims about Pope Benedict XVI himself being involved in a cover-up of child abuse by an American priest and a German priest, and newspaper reports using terms like ‘stuff of nightmares’, the ‘stench of evil’, and ‘systematic rape and torture’, anyone who tries to inject a bit of perspective into this debate is unlikely to be thanked.

But perspective is what we need. Someone has to point out that for all the problems with the Catholic Church’s doctrines and style of organisation – and I experienced some of those problems, having been raised a Catholic before becoming an atheist at 17 – the fact is that sexual abuse by priests is a relatively rare phenomenon.

Even in Ireland, whose image as a craic-loving nation has been replaced by the far-worse idea that it was actually a nation of priest rape, incidents of sexual abuse by priests were fairly rare.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which was launched by the Irish government in 1999 and delivered its report last year, intensively invited Irish-born people around the world to report on incidents of abuse in Irish religious-educational reform schools, where the majority of clerical abuse is said to have occurred, between the period 1914 to 1999.

For that 85-year period, 253 claims of sexual abuse were made by males and 128 by females. It is important – surely? – to note that these are claims of sexual abuse rather than proven incidents, since the vast majority of them did not go to trial.

The number of sexual abuse claims in these institutions fell for the more recent period: for males, there were 88 claims from the pre-1960s, 119 from 1960 to 1969, 37 from 1970 to 1979, and nine from 1980 to 1989.

The alleged sexual-abuse incidents ranged in seriousness from boys being ‘questioned and interrogated about their sexual activity’ to being raped: there were 68 claims of anal rape in reform institutions for boys from 1914 to 1999.

Not all of the sexual abuse was carried out by priests. Around 65 per cent of the claims pertain to religious workers, and 35 per cent to lay staff, care workers, and fellow pupils.

[This is really the first time I can recall of any journalist or commentator presenting the Irish situation in its proper perspective - in terms of timeline and the numbers involved. While scale does not diminish the offense nor the harm done to victims, scale is necessary to formulate any judgments about the situation. All along, by not mentioning actual figures, the media - including Catholic media - have left the impression that the Irish abuses were in the thousands, when it turns out we are talking of a few hundred claims, few of which have been adjudicated. This is one of the gravest errors - implicit exaggeration of facts by omitting to mention them - regularly committed by the media.]

Of course, one incident of child sexual abuse by a priest is one too many. But given the findings of Ireland’s investigation into abuse in religious-educational institutions, is there really a justification for talking about a ‘clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel’?

As Ireland is redefined as a country in recovery from child sexual abuse, and the ‘scandal of child rape’ [One must appreciate that O'Neill has the good sense to put that in quotation marks!] spreads further through Europe into Germany and Italy, it might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless: Very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.

The discussion of a relatively rare phenomenon as a ‘great evil’ of our age shows that child abuse in Catholic churches has been turned into a morality tale – about the dangers of belief and of hierarchical institutions and the need for more state and other forms of intervention into religious institutions and even religious families.

The first contemporary trend that has turned incidences of sexual abuse into a powerful symbol of evil is the cult of the victim, where today individuals are invited not only to reveal every misfortune that has befallen them – which of course is a sensible thing to do if you have been raped – but also to define themselves by those misfortunes, to look upon themselves as the end-products of having being emotionally, physically or sexually abused.

This is why very public revelations of Catholic abuse started in America and Ireland before more recently spreading to other parts of Western Europe: because the politics of victimhood, the cult of revelation and redefinition of the self as survivor, is more pronounced and developed in America and Ireland than it is in continental Europe.

In Ireland, for example, the state has explicitly invited its citizens to redefine themselves as victims of authority rather than as active agents capable of moving on and making choices.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse discusses at length the ‘debilitating’ impact that abuse can have on individuals, to the extent that many of Ireland’s social problems – including unemployment, poverty, drug abuse and heavy drinking – are now discussed as the products of Ireland’s earlier era of abuse rather than as failings of the contemporary social system.

This, I believe, is why claims of sexual abuse in Ireland’s religious-educational institutions were so much higher for the period of 1960 to 1969 (nearly half of all claims of sexual abuse against boys during the period of 1914 to 1989 were made for that decade).

It is not because priests suddenly became more abusive in the 1960s than they had been in the far harsher Ireland of the 1940s and 50s, but because the people who attended the institutions during that period were in many ways the main targets of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

They would have been in their mid-40s to mid-50s when the commission began in 1999 and many of them had suffered long-term unemployment, health problems, and other disappointments. Reporting their misfortunes to the commission offered them the chance, not only of getting financial compensation, but also of validating their difficult life experiences as a consequence of their having been abused.

In a grotesquely convenient marriage, the state redefined social problems as consequences of Catholic abuse and the individual redefined himself as a sufferer from low self-esteem who did not bear full responsibility for the course of his adult life. [I did not realize this, and suddenly, my opinion of Irish politicians - their parliamentary majority, at least - has dropped to rock-bottom.]

In such a climate, not only are incidents of abuse by priests more likely to surface, but they are also more likely to be heavily politicised, turned from undoubtedly distressing and possibly criminal acts into modern-day examples of evil capable of distorting society itself. Thus did the contemporary cult of victimhood ensure that Catholic abuse was blown out of proportion. [In fact, the greatest outrage committed by the victim advocacy groups and shyster lawyers aiming for megamillion settlements is fostering and fomenting this cult of victimhood.]

The second contemporary trend that has elevated something quite rare into a social disaster is the rise of the ‘new atheism’.

Now the dominant liberal outlook of our age – in particular in the media outlets that have most keenly focused on the Catholic abuse scandals: the New York Times, the Irish Times, and the UK Guardian – the new atheism differs from the atheism of earlier free-thinking humanists in that its main aim is not to enlighten, but to scaremonger about the impact of religion on society.

For these thinkers and opinion-formers, the drip-drip of revelations of abuse in Catholic institutions offers an opportunity to demonise the religious as backward and people who possess strong beliefs as suspect.

Many contemporary opinion-formers are not concerned with getting to the truth of how widespread Catholic sexual abuse was, or what were the specific circumstances in which it occurred; rather they want to milk incidents of abuse and make them into an indictment of religion itself.

[In the following paragraphs, I use purple to highlight the absurd claims made by the Catholic haters:]

They frequently flit between discussing priests who abuse children and the profound stupidity of people who believe in God. One commentator wildly refers to the Vatican’s ‘international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists’ and says most ordinary Catholics turn a blind eye to this because "people behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith".

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, unwittingly reveals what draws the new atheists towards the Catholic-abuse story: their belief that religion is itself a form of abuse.

"Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place", he argues.

He admits that physical abuse by priests is rare, but only to flag up what he sees as a more serious form of abuse: "Only a minority of priests abuse the bodies of the children in their care. But how many priests abuse their minds?"

In this spectacularly crude critique of religion, no moral distinction is made between being educated by a priest and raped by one – indeed, the former is considered worse than the latter, since as one Observer columnist recently darkly warned: "We have no idea what children are being taught in those classrooms…"

If ‘bringing a child up Catholic’ is itself abuse, there can only be one solution: external authorities must protect children not only from religious institutions but from their own religious parents, too. One new atheist has proposed an age of consent for joining a religion: 14.

In an Oxford Amnesty Lecture popular amongst new atheists, a liberal academic argued that children "have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas", and parents "have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose".

Here, a simplistic leap is made from protecting children from paedophile priests to protecting them from their own parents, since in the new-atheist view strong beliefs and freedom of religion – which, yes, includes the freedom of parents to bring up their children as they see fit – are the real problem. They exaggerate the extent of Catholic sexual abuse in order to strengthen their prejudicial arguments.

Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, you should be concerned about today’s abuse-obsession. Events of the (sometimes distant) past which nobody can change are being used to justify dangerous trends in the present.

A new kind of society is being solidified on the back of exposing abusive priests, one in which scaremongering supersedes facts, where people redefine themselves as permanently damaged victims, where freedom of thought is problematised, and where parents are considered suspect for not adhering to the superior values of the atheistic elite.

Seriously, radical humanists [and all right-thinking, fair-minded persons] should fight back against this.


If only more journalists and 'opinion-makers' as fair-minded and intellectually honest as Mr. O'Neill is! Richard Dawkins personifies the worst case of a dishonest intellectual, whose primal passions get in the way of his brain functioning and doesn't realize it!

BTW, O'Neill's article is very apropos considering that since the Holy Father's visit to the US, a great deal of the pre-visit coverage in the US, Australia and Malta was devoted to speculation as to whether he will meet with victims of pedophile priests - speculation that is really overt pressure for such a meeting. As though the Pope would be derelict in the worst way - another nail for the already nail-riddled coffin of his reputation where the MSM are concerned - if, for some good reason, such a meeting failed to take place!

The Pope cites Mozart's
Christian attitude on death
by Salvatore Izzo






CASTEL GANDOLFO, Sept. 7 (Translated from AGI) - "Every time I listen to Mozart, I cannot help remembering my parish church when, as a boy, his Masses would sound forth on feast days. In my heart, I felt that a ray of heaven's beauty had reached me, and I feel the same, even today, in listening to this great meditation, that is both dramatic and serene, on death".

These were some of Benedict XVI's remarks tonight after listening to a performance of Mozart's 'Requiem Mass in D minor', which was unfinished when the composer died, in the inner courtyard of the Apostolic palace.

The concert was performed by the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, with Claudio Desderi conducting, and the participation of the Coro Accademia della Voce of Turin and four soloists. It was arranged as a tribute to the first five years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The Pope called the Requiem "an elevated expression of faith, a faith that well knows the tragic potential of human existence and does not hide its tragic aspects, but nonetheless, an expression of Christian faith in its awareness that all of man's life is illuminated by God's love".

He said that "in Mozart, everything is in perfect harmony, every note, every musical phrase. That's how it is, and it could not be otherwise. Opposites are reconciled and 'Mozartian serenity' envelops everything, at every moment".

"This is a gift of God's grace," he said, "but also the fruit of Mozart's living faith, which, particularly in his sacred music, succeeds in reflecting the luminous answer of God's love, which gives hope, even when human life is torn by suffering and death".

A connoisseur of Mozart's music, Benedict XVI also cited the last letter of the composer to his father, dated April 4, 1787, in which Mozart, writing about the final stage of life on earth, confesses to have become "so familiar with this sincere friend of man... (that) the image of death no longer has anything terrifying about it"... but instead "appears tranquilizing and comforting". He says he thanks God for having given him "the fortune of recognizing in death the key to our happiness".

"I never go to bed," the letter goes on, "without thinking that perhaps tomorrow, I will have ceased to be. And yet, no one among all those who know me can say that I was sad or bad-humored when in their company. For this, I thank my Creator daily, and I wish the same with all my heart to all my peers".

For the theologian Pope, the letter "manifests a profound and simple faith, which emerges in the great prayer that the Requiem is, which leads us, at the same time, to love intensely the events of our earthly life as a gift from God, but to rise above all that and be able to look serenely at death as the 'key' for entering the gate to eternal happiness".

To the musicians from Padua and the choir members from Turin, the Pope recalled that "the young Mozart, travelling through Italy with his father, stayed in many places, including the Piedmont and the Veneto, but above all, we know that he valued the lively musical activity in Italy, marked in his time by composers like Hasse, Sammartini, Padre Martini, Piccinni, Jommelli, Paisiello, Cimarosa, to name a few".

He concluded:
"Dear friends, I heartily thank the Orchestra of Padua and the Veneto and the Choir from Turin for having offered us this moment of interior joy and spiritual reflection with an intense execution of Mozart's Requiem.

"I also thank Mons. Marcelo Sorondo, secretary of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for the words that he addressed to me, and all the various entities who contributed to organizing this event".







A side note which will probably cause teeth-gnashing and apoplexy among GG 'dislikers'!:

Book prize for GG
Adapted from the 9/8/10 issue of


Mons. Georg Gaenswein (seen in the last photo above) has won the 2010 Premio San Michele of Capri for Best Book of Pictures-and-Documentation for BENEDETTO XVI URBI ET ORBI released last spring on the fifth anniversary of the Pontificate. Gaenswein chose the pictures and wrote the captions and brief texts to document the Pontificate. In his words; "To follow the Holy Father urbi from his apostolic seat in Rome, and orbi, in his apostolic visits in Italy and various nations abroad", and notes that "the end of one trip is always the eve of another one".

The Pope as Cardinal Ratzinger won the Premio San Michele Grand Prize for Best Book three times.

This story tries to grab attention by making a big deal out of a wholly incidental detail...

Anglican clergywoman to greet
Pope Benedict in Westminster Abbey
Riazat Butt
Religious Affairs correspondent

Tuesday 7 September 2010


Pope Benedict's arrival in Britain breaks new ground on many levels, with a state welcome from the Queen and the beatification of Cardinal Henry Newman. But buried in the itinerary is another and, some would say, more piquant landmark.

Next Friday, the Pope will meet the Rev Jane Hedges, canon steward of Westminster Abbey and a campaigner for women bishops in the Church of England. [So??? He will be meeting her because she happens to be one of the officers of the Abbey, and not by design! His main host at the event is the Archbishop of Canterbury who, the last anyone checked, is male.]

It will be the first time the head of the Vatican, which earlier this year declared female ordination a "crime against the faith", shakes hands with a clergywoman. [But not the first time for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was photographed once with Germany's first-ever woman bishop, the Lutheran Maria Jepsen, who was made a bishop in 1992. Ironically, she resigned last July after allegations that she failed to act swiftly and decisively to investigate cases of sexual abuse in her diocese that she had known about since 1999 ! But the MSM was too obsessed with Catholic pedophile priests that few took note of it outside Germany.]

Their meeting will act as a reminder of the differences and difficulties between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic church. The abbey team is aware of the many historic aspects to the visit.

"We shall greet this Pope as our guest. There will no hint of battle," wrote the dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Dr John Hall, last week in the Tablet, a weekly Catholic newspaper.

An ecumenical evensong will begin with an exchange of peace between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Benedict XVI, and include a psalm, the Magnificat, readings and prayers. "I have no doubt that it will be a memorable occasion. Yet it will also be coloured by many emotions," Hall said.

It was almost a year ago that the Pope created the ordinariate [For a religion affairs correspondent, the wrong terminology for what the Pope did: the Ordinariate is just a mechanism contained in the central enabling document, which is the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus] - a way for traditionalist Anglicans to convert to Catholicism – their desire prompted largely, but not solely, by the ordination of women, which is often cited as the single biggest obstacle to reconciliation and unity between the two denominations.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was informed of the initiative two weeks before its announcement. [This is the spin that the Anglicans and their media sympathizers have used. But Williams couldn't have been completely in the dark because it was an open secret for more than a decade that the Traditional Anglican Communion was in correspondence with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over the mechanics of a 'mass conversion'!]

"It looked at first as though battle lines were being drawn, to the embarrassment of all: papal tanks to be deposited on the Lambeth palace lawns and groups of partially reordered Anglicans to be landed on Westminster Cathedral's forecourt," wrote Hall. [Typical Anglican hyperbole at the time, to make it look as though the Pope had actively pursued the disaffected Anglicans, not the other way around.]

However, within a month, amid speculation over Williams's leadership, the two met in Rome, and proclaimed their desire to strengthen ecumenical relations.

This depth of friendship and respect should not be underestimated, says Monsignor Andrew Faley, of the Catholic bishops' conference of England and Wales, who described the body language at that meeting as "utterly cordial and one of equality".

"There is a serenity about the relationship. [The Pope] will be welcomed into the home of the archbishop, it is a very reciprocal gesture of friendship and closeness, the tone of the meeting is a very mature one."

[Williams is too intelligent and too Christian to harbor any resentment against the Pope for doing what he did. If he were in Benedict XVI's shoes, he would have done something similar - more creative or less, we cannot know. But he wouldn't have left the requesting Anglicans stewing without any response!]

On the subject of the ordinariate, which will allow Anglicans to convert but retain aspects of their own heritage, he said: "It might have been more helpful had the archbishop been kept informed. [When was it ever prudent to telegraph a move that was clearly going to be controversial before it was ready to be executed? I think Williams was informed as soon as talks with the TAC were conclusive and the Pope had taken his final decision. Even TAC, which had been quite gung-ho in their PR campaign about their decision to convert, held on their horses in the run-up to the Vatican announcement!] I do not think the Ordinariate is anything to do with the strength of our relationship."

One senior Anglican also thinks the papal project will have little or no impact on the visit, calling it a "red herring". [That's the sensible and realistic view.]

The Rt Rev Tom Wright, the former bishop of Durham, said: "People leave the Roman Catholic church for Anglicanism and the other way round. It has always been the case, it is two-way traffic.

"It is easy to think ecumenical relations are what happens at a high level in public statements, but it's what happens on the ground that is important."

He dismissed the Vatican's horror over women's ordination as "surface noise", but it is difficult to see past robust views. [That cavalier attitude is similar to the Church of England's attitude towards the concerns of the traditional Anglicans that led to Anglicanorum coetibus! Besides, to call the Vatican's opposition to women's ordination as nothing but 'surface noise' is insulting to the Church's doctrinal integrity!]

At the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade meeting of the world's Anglican bishops, the Vatican contingent scolded them for failing to reach a consensus on the ordination of women and gays as bishops.

Liberal churches were suffering from "spiritual Alzheimer's and ecclesiastical Parkinson's", homosexuality was "disordered behaviour" that must have the clear condemnation of all and unrest in the Communion posed a "further and grave challenge for full and visible unity". [Why is it that everytime the Church expresses its doctrine in unadulterated terms, she is accused of 'scolding' others? She is dutybound to reiterate her teachings on every possible occasion, as Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal Dias did at the Lambeth Conference. And yet, everyone else has been lecturing and hectoring the Church on her internal affairs!]

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Southwark, the Most Rev Kevin McDonald, spent eight years at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He said those involved in ecumenical dialogue had to consider where it was leading. "It is a matter of trust and faith.

"The Church of England has been trying to find a way of accommodating people. [And have decided lately that they will not accomodate the anti-liberal elements of their Church even with a compromise arrangement that the latter were willing to live with!] They are running into a lot of trouble doing that. The Catholic Church does not want to tell the Church of England how to deal with this. There is no reason to think there is a pulling back on either side, but there has been a reality check."

Anglicans and Roman Catholics are in a "different place" to where they were in the 1960s and 70s,
"People should not underestimate what we do have in common, perhaps it is best to capitalise on that, not make the best enemy of the good."

Previous meetings between popes and archbishops have been heavy with symbolism: Paul VI presenting Archbishop Michael Ramsey with his diamond and emerald episcopal ring in 1966, John Paul II walking with Robert Runcie in Canterbury cathedral in 1982.

The sight of Benedict XVI and Williams praying for unity at the shrine of Edward the Confessor could be a defining moment: the 11th century monarch is the patron saint of kings, difficult marriages and separated spouses.

[I believe the Catholic Church has taken the most realistic attitude about Christian unification. Everyone must continue to work at it, but ultimately, it will happen when God thinks it is the right time... Anglicans and evangelical Protestants should consider that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which are the only authentic 'apostolicc' churches, together comprising almost 1.5 billion individuals [against a worldwide total of 670-million for all other Christian denominations including the Anglican Communion's 80-million), are in complete agreement against any liberalizing of traditional Christian doctrine and practices. If it were an issue that could be put to a vote - and even allowing for the proportion of dissident liberal Catholics - 1.5 billion Catholics and Orthodox against 670-million Protestants is an overwhelming majority!]


On a happier note...



Spiritual bouquet for the Pope
from Aid to Church in Need


LONDON, SEPT. 6, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Over 32,000 rosary decades and 11,500 Masses will be offered for Benedict XVI's Sept. 16-19 visit to the United Kingdom.

Aid to the Church in Need reported that its prayer and action campaign for the intention of the Pope's visit has seen an "enthusiastic" response.

[The current newscrawl on the charity's UK site also says that as part of 'spiritual gifts for the Pope' from its supporters, there have been 6,344 donations for projects in the Middle East and 3,286 hours of Eucharistic Adoration.]

Neville Kyrke-Smith, the national director of the aid agency's U.K. branch, said, "Whilst there has been much negativity in the secular media about the visit of Pope Benedict, it is a fantastic sign of faith that the friends of Aid to the Church in Need have renewed their commitment to pray for the Holy Father and the suffering Church."

He noted that the spirit of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who will be beatified during the Pontiff's visit, is "very much alive -- the generosity of so many Catholics speaks 'heart to heart' to all those who suffer today."

"The commitment of prayer equates to over six months of continuous prayer," Kyrke-Smith affirmed.

He said, "Our hope is that prayer will continue, in support of the proclamation of the Gospel in today's challenging world."

Supporters who requested to have Masses said for the intentions of the Pope will have their names written in a commemorative book, which will be presented to the Pontiff on his visit.

Stipends for these Masses will be used by the aid agency to help priests in countries experiencing persecution or other forms of suffering.

The agency is also including in the commemorative book the names of donors who support its work in the Middle East.

It noted that the emphasis on aid to that region comes "in direct response to a request from Benedict XVI who warned that as a result of oppression, poverty and emigration, the Church there is threatened in its very existence."

The agency received over 6,300 donations for the Middle East projects, which include subsidized housing for Christians in Jerusalem, emergency support for Iraqi Christians who are displaced in other countries or regions, support for seminarians and religious, construction of churches, and media initiatives.

Kyrke-Smith stated that "this positive Papal campaign encourages us all in faith, hope and charity for Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world."

Patricia Hatton, the agency's U.K. fundraising and marketing manager, underlined the fact that this campaign has "given a voice" to those benefactors "who, in the face of media indifference and worse, believe strongly in the message of Christ and who are convinced that prayer has the power to strengthen the life of the Church."

The agency shared some of the messages from these benefactors. One stated, "I am concerned that every opportunity should be taken to show the world, particularly the secular ascendancy here, that British Catholics are devoted to the Pope."

Another donor affirmed the aid agency's work to "support the suffering Church," while being "totally loyal to the Holy Father."


And a necessary reminder of the immediate motivation for the papal visit:


Pope Benedict XVI to highlight
ongoing relevance of Newman
By Cindy Wooden


VATICAN CITY. Sept. 7 (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI's decision to travel to Great Britain to personally beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman will give him an opportunity to highlight Cardinal Newman's teaching about the relation between faith and reason, the role of conscience and the place of religion in society.

During his Sept. 16-19 trip, the Pope will visit the Scottish cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow before traveling to London and Birmingham for the beatification. Cardinal Newman was a 19th-century theologian and intellectual who was a leader in the Anglican reform effort known as the Oxford Movement before becoming a Catholic.

The Pope will celebrate open-air Masses, meet Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron and make a major address to leaders of British society. His visit includes a meeting with leaders of other religions, an ecumenical prayer service and a visit to a home for the aged.

But the Vatican has billed the trip as a pastoral visit "on the occasion of the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman."

Since his election more than five years ago, Pope Benedict has presided over several canonization ceremonies, but he always has delegated the task of presiding over beatifications to highlight the different importance of the two ceremonies. [More precisely, his primary reason for this rule is that beatifications generally have local significance primarily - except universally-known figures like Mother Teresa, John Paul II and now Cardinal Newman - and therefore, the beatification is most appropriately celebrated in the candidate's home diocese (or diocese most associated with him/her) with local bishops presiding.]

The Pope's decision to make an exception for Cardinal Newman demonstrates his personal admiration for the British churchman, an admiration he once said went back to his first semester of seminary theology studies in 1946.

"For us at that time, Newman's teaching on conscience became an important foundation" for theological reflection, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said at a conference in 1990 marking the centenary of Cardinal Newman's death.

World War II had just ended, he said, and the German seminarians who had grown up under Adolf Hitler witnessed the "appalling devastation of humanity" that resulted from a totalitarian ruler who "negated the conscience of the individual."

While most of the world's totalitarian regimes have fallen, Pope Benedict often has warned that the individual conscience -- which must seek and try to act on truth -- is being threatened today by a culture of moral relativism, which asserts that nothing is always right or always wrong and almost anything is permissible.

Pope Benedict also often speaks of the essential interplay of faith and reason, a point Cardinal Newman emphasized. While embracing faith and knowing there were no scientific proofs for God's existence, the cardinal was convinced that believing in God was reasonable, an idea that frequently is challenged by modern British schools of philosophical atheism.

Cardinal Newman's commitment to the search for truth, his concern for fidelity to doctrine and his conviction that faith must be lived publicly all are key concepts in the teachings of Pope Benedict as well.

In his celebrations with Catholics in Great Britain and his addresses to British leaders, the Pope is expected to emphasize his conviction that religious belief is not a hindrance to social progress and peaceful coexistence.

Over the past year, news of the trip led to anti-visit petition drives and promises of protests, primarily over the use of taxpayer money to fund the visit of a religious leader, but also because of Catholic Church positions on moral issues such as contraception and homosexuality.

Groups representing victims of clerical sex abuse also have threatened to protest the papal visit, while officials at the Vatican and in England have said it is possible the Pope would meet privately with some victims as he did in the United States, Australia and Malta.

Pope Benedict will be welcomed to Great Britain by Queen Elizabeth, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England. He also will meet privately and pray publicly with Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, primate of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion.

The fact that Cardinal Newman's Christian faith and theology initially was formed within the Church of England will require particular sensitivity at a difficult time in the Roman Catholic-Anglican search for full unity.

The Rev. David Richardson, director of the Anglican Center in Rome and the archbishop of Canterbury's representative to the Vatican, said that while some people may see Cardinal Newman's beatification as another point of contention, "it's much more likely that the beatification will be bridge building."

The liturgical calendar of the Church of England already commemorates Newman, whom many Anglicans honor as an eminent theologian, a person of prayer and a force of renewal for the church, he said.

"This beatification is not simply a piece of triumphalism for a dead Roman Catholic, but it's actually an opportunity to embrace a wholeness -- his Anglicanism as well as his Catholicism," Rev. Richardson said.

At a time when many saw a danger of the Church of England being treated almost as a department of the English government, Newman was a leader in the Anglican Oxford Movement's effort to return to the teachings of the early Christian theologians in order to recover a sense of the church as a sacred institution with a divine mandate.

As he continued his search for the truth, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847 and was named a cardinal in 1879.

Msgr. Mark Langham, a priest of the Diocese of Westminster and an official of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said, "You cannot begin to understand Newman the Catholic without Newman the Anglican."

"It is very clear that it was his study and his quest for the truth -- an absolutely integrated quest for the truth as an Anglican -- that moved him toward Catholicism," Msgr. Langham said.

At the same time, while convinced that the fullness of truth was found in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Newman valued the formation he received as an Anglican and "was always very clear that his role was not one of trying to poach people for the Roman Catholic Church," he said.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/09/2010 09:06]

Saint Ninian's land
awaits Benedict XVI
by Cardinal Keith Michael Patrick O'Brien
Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh
President of the Scottish Bishops' Conference
Translated from the 9/8/10 issue of





Benedict XVI will arrive in Edinburgh on Sept. 16 for a four-day visit in the United Kingdom. The capital of Scotland is also the seat of the Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh which will welcome the Pope.

Immediately upon arrival, the Pope will be taken to the royal palace of Holyrood House, where he will have a historic meeting with Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, some members of Government, Parliamentarians and other authorities from Scotland, England, Wales and North Ireland.

The Catholics of Scotland are proud to welcome the Pontiff at the start of his visit, on the Feast of St. Ninian of Galloway, apostle of Scotland. Tradition narrates that Ninian travelled from Rome where he had been ordained bishop and arrived in Scotland more than 1500 years ago, in 397.


Right, figure of St. Ninian, from a stained-glass window, Edinburgh Castle.

He founded a small Christian community at a point in the extreme south of Scotland which he called White House, now known as Whithorn from its dialect corruption. It is considered the first Scottish city and one of the first colonies of the nation.

Although the tight program will not allow a visit to Whithorn by Benedict XVI, St. Ninian will nonetheless be present in the course of the day. While the Pope is in Holyrood Palace, a parade will be going on in the center of Edinburgh to celebrate St. Ninian's Day, with the participation of schoolchildren from all over Scotland.

There will be a historical theatrical show in the open, which will relive important moments in the development of the territory now known as Scotland, and the cultural Scottish patrimony will be celebrated with traditional bagpipe music.

After saying farewell to Queen Elizabeth, Benedict XVI will travel through the center of Edinburgh in the Popemobile where he will be feted by the schoolchildren and other people assembled to watch the historical reenactments.

After lunch and a midday rest, Benedict XVI will then head for Glasgow. Once again, he will pass through crowds in the Popemobile all the way to Bellahouston Park, where he will celebrate Mass for more than 100,000 persons, but which will be seen my millions around the world through TV and the Internet. The choirs will consist of hundreds of singers, along with the accompanists.

We await eagerly the words of the Holy Father in his homily. In view of his recent decision to establish a Pontifical Council for the Promotion of New Evangelization, the words that he will address to the Scottish people take on a particular value.

We live in a land where the seeds of the Gospel were first sown more than 1500 years ago. They made of it a land of saints and scholars, famous for giving birth to missionaries like Columban, and holy men adn women like Margaret, Queen of Scotland, and scholars like John Duns Scotus; and for being the site of renowned monastic communities like Border Abbey, and famous centers of instruction developed thanks to the establishment by the Church of great universities in the late Middle Ages.

A great rupture with the past took place in the 16th century because of the Protestant Reformation, when almost all of the population of the mainland and many of the islands gradually abandoned the Catholic faith of their ancestors to embrace Presbyterianism.

Celebration of the Mass was prohibited, and priests were persecuted and expelled. A famous case was that of the Jesuit priest John Ogilvie, who was arrested while he was saying Mass for the tiny Catholic community in Glasgow. He was imprisoned and convicted in 1615. In 1976, he was canonized by Paul VI.

From the death of John Ogilvie to the arrival of Catholic immigrants from Ireland in the 19th century, there were practically no Catholics left in the cities and principal towns of Scotland. But gradually, a Catholic population started to re-establish itself. Most of them were still poor and uneducated. The need to teach the children of the Catholic immigrants was deeply felt, and as the Catholic population grew, so too did the number of priests, and of religious men and women who arrived to take care of the children's education.

Catholic instruction was provided alongside that provided by regular schools inspired by the Presbyterian ethic. But notwithstanding the quality of instruction they received, young Catholics found it practically impossible to have access to university education and to the professions.

Encouraged and sustained by the perseverance of priests, brothers, and, to a very significant degree, of female religious organizations, the small but growing community continued to believe in the value of education. Thus, with farsightedness and many sacrifices, every effort was made so that children could attend Catholic schools.

A small number of the enlightened members of society sustained these efforts from the beginning, such that the Catholic school system could grow and develop parallel to that of the government, until in 1918, the government agreed to take over the financial and administrative responsibilities for the Catholic schools, while allowing the Church to maintain school direction, thus assuring -within the state sector - the Catholic management and identity of Catholic schools, up to the present.

The Catholic population in Scotland continued to grow during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. In addition to those who came from Ireland, there were those who came from Italy, and from central and eastern Europe.

In the 20th century, Catholics contributed even more to the entire Scottish society, in the workplace and in the professions. They have continued to have strong links to other Catholic communities, especially with Ireland, where many priests serving the Church in Scotland have their roots. There are Scottish Catholics in Canada where, in the diocese of Antigonish (whose patron saint is St. Ninian), descendants of Scottish immigrants still speak Gaelic.

Other links can be found in Australia, and it is with great joy and pride that the Scottish Catholics, especially those from the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles, are looking forward to the canonization of Blessed Mary McKillop, whose parents emigrated from Scotland to Australia in the 19th century.

In 1982, John Paul II visited Scotland and left a lasting memory not only for Catholics but even in the greater Christian community and all of Scottish society.

He encouraged the Catholic Church in Scotland to have a decisive role in the life of the nation, and especially, to move forward in the ecumenical dialog with our Christian brothers and sisters.

Today in 2010, we await Benedict XVI's visit with great anticipation while we look to the future with certainty. In recent years, the Catholic community has become richer, thanks to a new wave of immigration from central and eastern Europe, particularly from Poland, and from southern India.

The need for dialog among religions has become much more urgent than it was 30 years ago. We trust that the voice of the Pope will be heard by our brothers and sisters in Christ, by people of other religions, and by all men of good will.

For our part, as Catholics we can be sure that he will confirm us in the faith and that he will give us the encouragement and the support that we need to face the challenges of the present, and to continue bearing witness to Christ who is the way, the truth and the life.


What Cardinal O'Brien does not say is that it was his idea to stage a St. Ninian's Day parade to welcome the Pope, an idea welcomed by the City Council of Edinburgh which has even put up a website for it:

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The St Ninian's Day Parade will mark the historic occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Scotland and celebrates the first man to be named a Saint in Scotland, nearly 1600 years ago.

Spectators are invited to watch the parade and welcome Pope Benedict XVI to Scotland.



The parade will start at 11:00am from Regent Road and march along Princes Street. This is a free event and spectators are advised to arrive in plenty of time.

To this day Ninian is a saint held in common by all Scottish Christians and, indeed, by all Scots. That's why the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Cardinal Keith Patrick O'Brien, asked the question earlier this year - "Why don't we resurrect the great festivities that used to surround St Ninian's Day in this country? A grand Scottish spectacle to welcome Benedict XVI."

He wanted an event that is:
*Joyous - creating a truly memorable day for all who attend.
•Charitable - raising money for good causes, both at home and abroad.
•Inclusive - welcoming to everybody regardless of religion.

The result is the St Ninian's Day Parade! Up to a billion people around the world will be watching. Be part of it! You're very welcome. See you in Edinburgh on the 16th of September!

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The parade will feature pipers and drummers from Scotland and further afield, who will lead the parade from Regent Road and along Princes Street. Pipe Bands will play 'Highland Cathedral' as Pope Benedict XVI travels past.

Our VIP’s will be nearly 1000 school pupils from St Ninian Schools around Scotland who will help turn Princes Street into a sea of blue. To add to the colour thousands of flags that will be given out to spectators along the route.

Over the last 1,600 years Scotland has had a remarkable history and the St Ninian’s Parade will also be a fantastic opportunity for spectators and the media to meet and greet important characters from Scotland's past, including William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox and Robert Burns and of course, St Ninian himself.

As the World media focus on Scotland we want to bring to Scotland’s remarkable history to life and offer a huge welcome to everyone who would like to enjoy the St Ninian’s Day Parade which will take place on the 16 September.

Said Councillor Jenny Dawe, leader of the Edinburgh City Council:
“This is a superb opportunity for Edinburgh to be seen on the world stage and to showcase the city as an excellent host of major events. While many people overseas already appreciate Edinburgh’s qualities as a place in which to work, study and holiday, I hope that some of the millions watching the Pope’s arrival in the UK are encouraged to come and see our city for themselves. It is undoubtedly a significant visit and I’m sure that the city will, as usual, rise to the occasion."

Pope welcomes Catholic University in Sweden




Left, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, superior gneeral of the Society of Jesus.

UPPSALA, Sweden, SEPT. 7, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The first Catholic university recognized in Sweden since 1477 was praised by a papal message encouraging the community responsible for the institute to be dedicated with heart and mind to the pursuit of divine and human wisdom.

The Jesuit-run Newman Institute inaugurated the academic year on Saturday in Uppsala. It was founded in 2001, but it was only recently given government accreditation as a university.

A message from the Pope, sent by his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, affirmed the Holy Father's hopes that this "center of Catholic excellence" will be characterized by "the illustrious tradition of study, the impartial pursuit of knowledge in all realms and a strong commitment, both with divine as well as with human reason."

Father Adolfo Nicolás, superior-general of the Society of Jesus, presided over Mass on Saturday morning in the parish church of St. Lawrence in Uppsala.

He explained in the homily that the university hopes to offer ways to "learn to live better."

The Jesuit spoke about the entry of Catholic thought in public education as a sign of effective openness to plurality. And he pointed out that liberty of conscience is acquired through the pursuit of truth: "Newman was faithful to his conscience, something that is always difficult."

Father Nicolás advocated a struggle against "common sense" understood as the "spirit of the time, which does not always mean good sense, but prejudice and preconceived ideas."

He pointed out that Cardinal John Henry Newman (who will be beatified by the Pope this month in England) had the courage to diverge from "common sense" and to be faithful to his mission, seeking something more profound, "and this brings difficulties."

Alluding to the spirituality of the Society of Jesus, the priest spoke of a "magic word for the Jesuits: 'magis,' [which means] more, that is, to dig deeply, to understand the question that is behind the question, to look for something even more profound."

Father Nicolás called for prayers for the Newman Institute, that its "contribution to education will be total, not only for the mind but also for the heart, recovering the best philosophical tradition of educating the heart."

"Plato would say: The objective of philosophy is to help us to live. We want the institute to contribute to make the Swedish people live with joy, openness and truth," he concluded.

The Vatican newspaper described the accreditation of this university as "the most significant event of the Catholic Church in Sweden since the Reformation excluded it from public life."

Philosophy and theology are the primary faculties, with studies also on Scandinavian and European art and culture.

L'Osservatore Romano classified the institute as "the most mature fruit of the commitment that the Jesuits, for decades, have lavished on Swedish life through the university and it is the beginning of a pact between the secularized society of Northern Europe and Catholic culture."

Wednesday, Sept. 8, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

FEAST OF THE NATIVITY OF THE VIRGIN MARY
Illustrations: From left, Icon (10th-cent.);Domenico Beccafumi, 1543; Master Bertram of Minden, c. 1500; Esteban Murillo, 1658.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090810.shtml



The only story on the Pope in today's issue of the OR is the guest article by Cardinal Keith O'Brien of St Andrews and Edinburgh welcoming the Holy Father to the first stage of his four-day trip to the UK (translated two posts above). Also, the story on Mons. Gaenswein winning the Premio San Michele of Capri for his book documenting the first five years of the Pontificate in pictures, captions and brief texts of his impressions. Page 1 stories: An essay on the Nativity of Mary, continuing the OR's series of seeing lliturgical feasts through the Syro-Occidental tradition; a puff piece on Obama's latest campaign ploy to deal with unemployment; a new denunciation of the ongoing civilian deaths from the Somali civil war; and Europe's foreign ministers stalemated on financial and economic measures to get the European economy moving.


THE POPE'S DAY

General Audience today - The Holy Father flew to the Vatican from Castel Gandolfo for the GA
held in the Aula Paolo VI. He concluded his catechesis on Hildegarde von Bingen and read a message
to the people of the United Kingdom anticipating his coming visit.

After the GA, he met with
- Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Address in English.
- H.E. José Maria Pereira Neves, Prime Minister of Cape Verde, who earlier met with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone


STATEMENT ON PROPOSED KORAN BURNING
BY A FRINGE U.S. RELIGIOUS GROUP

Sept. 8, 2010

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The Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue received with great concern the news of the proposed "Koran Burning Day" on the occasion of the Anniversary of the September 11th tragic terrorist attacks in 2001 which resulted in the loss of many innocent lives and considerable material damage.

These deplorable acts of violence, in fact, cannot be counteracted by an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community. Each religion, with its respective sacred books, places of worship and symbols, has the right to respect and protection.

We are speaking about the respect to be accorded the dignity of the person who is an adherent of that religion and his/her free choice in religious matters.

The reflection which necessarily should be fostered on the occasion of the remembrance of September 11th would be, first of all, to offer our deep sentiments of solidarity with those who were struck by these horrendous terrorist attacks. To this feeling of solidarity we join our prayers for them and their loved ones who lost their lives.

Each religious leader and believer is also called to renew the firm condemnation of all forms of violence, in particular those committed in the name of religion.

Pope John Paul II affirmed: "Recourse to violence in the name of religious belief is a perversion of the very teachings of the major religions" (Address to the new Ambassador of Pakistan, 16 December 1999).

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, similarly expressed, "…violence as a response to offences can never be justified, for this type of response is incompatible with the sacred principles of religion..." (Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI, to the new Ambassador of Morocco, 6 February 2006).

---

Background:
Pastor Terry Jones of the evangelical Dove World Outreach Center in Florida [said to have a membership of about 50 persons] has said he would go ahead with plans to burn copies of Islam's holy book this weekend despite opposition.

Demonstrations have already taken place in Afghanistan and Indonesia against the action, and the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan has warned this will unnecessarily bring more risks to US troops there.

One problem about the so-called 'evangelical' Christian sects is that anyone can call himself a pastor or minister, get together a handful or followers and proclaim themselves a 'church' (a sect, really). Which is the case with these bigoted pastor from Florida, who borrows a notion from radical Muslims to claim that burning Korans is his Christian duty!

His sanctimony is worse than that of the imam who insists that building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero {others say part of Ground Zero iself, since debris from one of the kamikaze terror planes fell over the building) is a gesture of healing and reconciliation.

As though everyone were naive enough to believe that a mosque would not be the camel's nose in the tent of hate. What's to stop them from having radical imams preaching jihad in that mosque, or radical extremists holding seminars on hate and violence in its attached 'cultural center', as radical Muslims have been doing wherever they are able to do so? Unfortunately, in a democracy, they are free to do that. But all the 9/11 families and their sympathizers ask is that they find a location not in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero. American society will simply have to be continually vigilant about opportunistic jihadists.

As for the bigoted pastor, apparently the ego trip of making worldwide headlines is far more important than considering the consequences of his bigotry - which includes putting the lives of American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan more on the line than they already are.

May the Holy Spirit cast his light on those involved in these troubling issues!