ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

Zollitsch admits shortcomings
in dealing with a 1992 case
against a parish priest with
a 20-year-record of sex offenses
Translated from

July 9, 2010


Mons. Robert Zollitsch, Bishop of Freiburg (Germany) and president of the German bishops' conference, has now admitted he committed errors in handling a sex abuse case in the past and asks the victims for their forgiveness.

He said that he had learned much earlier about sexual abuses committed by the parish priest of Oberharmsbach in Baden than he had earlier admitted - that he had been informed about the case in 1992, when, he said, he should have paid more attention to it by seeking out all possible victims as well as talking to witnesses.

Zollitsch made the admission and plea for forgiveness after speaking with victims of the parish priest, who was accused at the time of having sexually abused altar servers and other young boys over a 20-year period. He was made to retire in 1991, but authorities were never informed of his offenses.

At the same time, Zollitsch apologized for a statement made by his Archdiocesan spokesman in March and repeated in June that he learned of the priest's offenses only in 1995, after the priest was retired, even as he denied that he had ever covered up for the priest.

Zollitsch's archdiocese published an interim report Friday about reported cases of sexual abuse by priests, saying that in the first half of 2010, it had received complaints against 44 priests, religious and Church workers for sexual abuses committed between 1950 and 2000. [44 offenders is 44 too many, but the complaints cover a 50-year period.]

Of the 44, 36 were diocesan priests, of whom 16 have died and 12 are retired. Four priests have been dismissed from pastoral work, two complaints are still being investigated, and in two cases, the identity of the accused priest has not been established. Four of the complaints were against two priests and two instructors belonging to religious orders. Ten complaints were sent over to the civil authorities.

In each case, the archdiocese says it has sought to make contact with all possible victims to offer them assistance and counsel.


I hope the episode of his 'forgetfulness' has made Mons. Zollitsch realize how wrong it was for him and Mons. Marx of Munich to have been so high-handed with Mons. Mixa last April and pressuring him in public to resign before even talking to him.

In Belgium, a report from the online service of RTBF (Radio-Television Belge Francophone):

Cardinal Danneels protests
violation of secrecy
in current investigations
Translated from

July 9, 2010

The retired Primate of Belgium, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has filed a civil complaint against a Belgian magistrate for violating the secrecy of current investigations into complaints made against bishops and priests for alleged sexual abuse.

Danneels underwent ten hours of questioning earlier this week by authorities conducting the inquiry, Before his testimony, there were several leaks to the media about the alleged prurient content of a PC seized last week from the cardinal's residence.

It turns out that the so-called prurient files included information about the case of Belgian man convicted for raping and killing girls in the 1990s as part of a European pedophile network that reportedly involved high-ranking politicians. The information was contained in a CD sent to journalists and selected personages by a British outlet seeking reactions to the case.

The picture of a nude girl also found on the computer was apparently an art drawing executed by a student in Liege automaticallly downloaded to the PC during a visit to the site of RTBF itself.

Official Belgian sources said that the improper leaks about the Church investigation are being looked into.


I am prejudiced against Cardinal Danneels, but he has cooperated in the current investigation and has said he is happy to do so, and he is right to protest the flagrant violation of secrecy by the Belgian investigators while the inquiry is still ongoing.


Another most interesting report from DIE WELT has to do with the top two school officials at the Benedictine Abbey in Ettal, Mavaria, whom Munich Archbishop Reinhard Marx forced to resign last April after the disclosure of various sex abuses committed by priests decades ago - long before the two officials were in charge! ....

A new Vatican rebuke
for Munich's archbishop
Translated from

July 9, 2010


The air has not been good these days for MUNich's Archbishop Reinhard Marx. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI had harsh words for the way the German bishops had treated their former colleague Mons. Walter Mixa.

"After a time of often disproportionate polemics," the Pontiff wrote, "The German bishops should now show, more than they have before, their friendly closeness, their understanding, and their help so that Mons. Mixa can find the right way".

The words were unusually clear, and Freiburg Archbishop Robert Zollitsch and Marx must have felt it directed to them, for having taken the lead in bringing down the former Augsburg bishop and publicizing a report accusing him of alcoholism and other psychiatric problems.

Now the Vatican has sent another message to the German Church which is another rebuke to the Archbishop of Munich. This time it's about how he handled the revelation of decades-old sex abuses at the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal.



After the revelations in February, Marx forced the Abbot and the School Rector of Ettal to resign on the ground that they had not done enough to resolve the scandal.

But an apostolic visitation of Ettal ordered by the Vatican has now come to a different conclusion: Both officials had acted correctly and did everything they were required to do, and they should now resume their functions.

Ettal was the next big institution after the Jesuit Canisius College in Berlin to be identified as a Catholic school where abuses - sexual, corporeal and psychological - were perpetrated between 1960-1990 by some of the religious on children enrolled in the abbey's boarding school.

The abbey has posted the letter from Cardinal Franc Rode, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life (which oversees religious orders), informing the abbey of the Vatican decision.

Russian Church welcomes
nomination of Mons. Koch
to Christian Unity



Moscow, July 5 (Interfax) - The Moscow Patriarchate expresses hope for development of the dialogue with the Catholic Church under the new head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Bishop Kurt Koch.

"I hope that new prospects for cooperation have been opened for us for the benefit of the both Churches," said Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, in a message to Mons. Koch.

The Metropolitan pointed out that during teh half-century since the Council was established, it has "played an important role in defining ways of dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian Churches and communities."

"Thanks in no small degree to your predecessors as presidents of the Council, constructive relations have been developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church," the message reads.

Metropolitan Hilarion recalls that he has known Bishop Koch for many years "as a zealous pastor and serious theologian committed to the tradition of the Early Church and the idea of Christian unity."

He expressed hope that the bishop's pastoral ministry in Switzerland as one of the centers of inter-Christian dialogue and international diplomacy would help him fulfill new duties, while his rich experience would contribute to successful work by the Council.

In with the new:
Vatican's artistic landscape
keeps changing
By John Thavis





Benedict XVI blesses the statue to St. Annibale Maria Di Francia in the exterior Founders Gallery in the rear of St. Peter's Basilica.


VATICAN CITY, July 11 (CNS) -- Commissioning another statue for Vatican City might sound like overkill in a place where thousands of sculpted figures crowd the landscape.

But the Vatican is on a campaign to fill every niche. When Pope Benedict XVI stopped to bless a 16-foot-tall marble statue of St. Annibale Di Francia July 7, it was cause for celebration. Carved out of a single block of milky-white Carrara marble, it was placed in one of a series of recesses that run along the outside of St. Peter's Basilica.

In 1999, over the objections of architectural purists, the Vatican began filling the basilica's external niches, which were originally designed to be vacant. [I don't think they were 'designed to be left vacant' at all! They look exactly like niches waiting to be filled! Besides, the presence of built-in niches in institutional edifices implies that the spaces are meant to be eventually functional as well! In the same way that every available niche inside the Basilica has now been filled, including statues of 39 founder saints].


The statue to the Opus Dei founder was the first one installed in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, on Sept 14, 2005.

A whole section has since been occupied with founders of religious orders, including such figures as St. Bridget of Sweden, who established the Brigittines, and St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who founded Opus Dei.

Not just anyone gets a niche at St. Peter's. First of all, you have to be a saint. Second, someone needs to pay for the statue, which can cost more than $250,000. The size and design of the work must be pre-approved, and the sculptor must use the prized Carrara marble.

From their pedestals, the marble saints look out upon the Vatican's modern guest house and its gas station. They have a backdoor view from St. Peter's and will be seen primarily by those who live and work in Vatican City.

The Vatican is home to far more stone figures than living residents -- many times more, if you count the Vatican Museums' approximately 20,000 statues.

Why add more? That question was asked in the 1600s, when the remaining 39 empty niches inside St. Peter's began filling up with founders of religious orders. Already the interior was crowded with more than 300 statues of popes, bishops and saints, not to mention the winged cherubs that appear all over the place.

Yet it is traditional at the Vatican to keep adding works of art and decorative architecture. That's why visitors to the Vatican Museums can wander into rooms full of contemporary painting and sculpture, part of a vast collection of modern art works assembled under Pope Paul VI.

The fact that they're housed in the former bedroom of a 15th-century pope is a little incongruous, but no more so than finding Arnaldo Pomodoro's giant bronze spheres among the Belvedere Courtyard's collection of Roman statues.

Over the centuries, Vatican City has become one of the world's most jam-packed repositories of art and artifacts. The walled city-state is only 109 acres, smaller than a decent-sized golf course, yet it contains more than 150,000 museum-worthy items. Many are larger than life, like the 140 statues of saints that ring the colonnade around St. Peter's Square.

The Vatican Gardens host a wide variety of statuary from ancient and modern times, ranging from the sculpture of the River Nile to Our Lady of Fatima. The gardens are well-kept, and Pope Benedict walks there most afternoons, praying the rosary and chatting with his personal secretary.

It's a quiet environment, far from the din of Roman traffic, and the sound of water is everywhere. In early July, the pope inaugurated the 100th fountain inside the Vatican, this one dedicated to St. Joseph -- in honor of the German pontiff's namesake.

As Vatican fountains go, this one was simple: The water cascades into two elliptical stone basins. Some of the other fountains in Vatican City are intricate and playful, dedicated to eagles, sea creatures and dolphins, dragons, frogs, mirrors, an old maid and a 15-foot model sailing ship.

This largely hidden part of Vatican City is not all flowers and fountains, though. On the skyline can be seen the governor's mansion, an out-of-use train station, a heliport and a radio tower -- all built in the last century. Below ground are several subterranean parking lots, constructed in recent decades.

One thing Pope Benedict doesn't see on his afternoon walk is a statue of Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer condemned by the church in the 17th century for maintaining that the earth revolves around the sun, and rehabilitated in 1992 by a Vatican commission.

Last year, a large statue of Galileo was to have been commissioned for placement near the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which is located inside the Vatican Gardens. The project was quietly scrapped, however, with no official explanation.

"What we heard was that now you have to be a saint to have your statue in the Vatican," said one Vatican source.

Instead, a much smaller, 24-inch-tall statue of Galileo, holding a book in one hand and a telescope in the other, was completed and today sits in the library of the Pontifical Council for Culture.


P.S. One can only think that one founder who will not find a niche among the other founders nor become a saint is Fr. Marcial Maciel!

The Legionaries welcome
Papal Delegate 'with gratitude'
and look forward to his guidance




Pope Benedict XVI receives Mons. De Paolis, C.S., in a recent private audience.

Rome, July 9, 2010 - Today the Holy Father appointed Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, C.S., as his delegate for the Legion of Christ, as announced in a July 9 bulletin from the Holy See´s press office.

The practical details on how Archbishop De Paolis will fulfill his charge in the Legion of Christ will be defined in the upcoming weeks.

Archbishop De Paolis has broad experience and proven competence in his own religious congregation, in university teaching, and in service to the Holy See.

He is currently the president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, and a consulter for the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

As they welcome the pontifical delegate, the Legionaries of Christ once again express their deep gratitude to the Holy Father for his fatherly solicitude, and put themselves completely at the disposal of Archbishop De Paolis.


About Mons. De Paolis

Archbishop Velasio De Paolis was born in Sonnino (Latina province, southeast of Rome) on September 19, 1935. He entered the congregation of the Missionaries of St Charles Borromeo (the Scalabrinian Fathers) at a young age and received his formation in the congregation’s seminaries. He made his perpetual profession on October 4, 1958 and was ordained to the priesthood on March 18, 1961.

He went to Rome to continue his academic formation, obtaining a doctorate in canon law from the canon law faculty at the Pontifical Gregorian University, a licentiate in theology from the theology faculty at the University of St Thomas (Angelicum), and a law degree at La Sapienza University in Rome. He also completed a two-year degree in moral theology at the Alphonsian Academy.

From 1965 to 1970, he was a professor of moral theology and canon law in one of his own congregation’s centers for philosophical and theological formation. Afterwards, he was named rector of the Scalabrinian Fathers’ International College in Rome (1970-1974) while also serving as provincial vicar.

In 1974, he was called to the general government of his congregation as counselor and general procurator. From 1971 to 1980, he was an extraordinary professor, and from 1983 onward, an ordinary professor of the canon law faculty at the Gregorian University. From 1987 on, he was also named a professor at the Pontifical Urbanian University, and became dean of the canon law faculty in 1998.

He has authored many books and articles, and is a regular contributor to the magazine Periodica de re canonica. He is a member of various associations dedicated to the study of canon law.

Throughout all these years, he has dedicated himself to apostolic activity, especially to preaching spiritual exercises.

On December 20, 2003, Pope John Paul II appointed him as secretary of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, where he was already an officer. He received his episcopal consecration on February 24, 2004 and was assigned the titular see of Telepte.

On April 12, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI appointed him president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, raising him to the dignity of archbishop. He is currently also a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and a consulter for the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

Apparently, since trying to re-open - quite unsuccessfully - its media blitz against Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on the sexual abuse issue two weeks ago, the best the New York Tiems cna come up with so far is the following story about abuses by the Belgian clergy. It continues to try to associate the Vatican and Cardinal Ratzinger with covering up or inaction on sex abuses committed by Belgian priests - and bishop, in this case, but more out of reflex than for cause!


It took years to ignite
inquiry into abuses
by the Belgian clergy
By DOREEN CARVAJAL and STEPHEN CASTLE

Published: July 12, 2010


WESTVLETEREN, Belgium — Behind an aggressive investigation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Belgium that drew condemnation from the Pope himself lies a stark family tragedy: the molestation, for years, of a youth by his uncle, the bishop of Bruges; the prelate’s abrupt resignation when a friend of the nephew finally threatened to make the abuse public; and now the grass-roots fury of almost 500 people complaining of abuse by priests.

The first resignation of a European bishop for abusing a child relative came unexpectedly on April 23. At 73, the Bruges bishop, Roger Vangheluwe, Belgium’s longest-serving prelate, tersely announced his retirement and acknowledged molesting “a boy in my close entourage.”

The boy, not named, was his own nephew, now in his early 40s.

The nephew’s story, pieced together through documents and interviews with him and others, shows that the nephew, acting after years of torment and strong evidence of church inaction, finally forced the bishop’s hand when the friend sent e-mail messages to all of Belgium’s bishops threatening to expose Bishop Vangheluwe.

For nearly 25 years, the nephew said, he sought to alert others that he had been molested by his uncle. Abuse started when he was 10, according to a retired priest, the Rev. Rik Devillé, who said he had tried to warn Belgium’s cardinal, Godfried Danneels, about the Bruges prelate’s abuse 14 years ago, but was berated for doing so.

It is not known whether Cardinal Danneels or others notified the Vatican, itself mired in allegations of inaction on sexual abuse, about the case at the time.

The Vatican accepted the bishop’s resignation as the scandal erupted in April but said nothing about the case until the Belgian police raided church properties in late June, an act that Pope Benedict XVI called “deplorable.” [But that is a blatant lie! On the day that the Vatican announced the Holy Fahter's acceptance of the bishop's resignation, it also released the texts of two declarations made at a news conference in Brussels that day by Bishop Vangheluwe himself admitting to his offenses, and by Archbishop Andre-Mutien Leonard, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and president of the Belgian bishops' conference, about the case.]

Now Belgium is unique in that civil authorities seized the documents that the church might have used to pursue its own investigations, apparently placing long-shrouded cases in the public realm.

Over the years, the nephew — who still does not want his name used publicly — channeled his rage into creating art: giant screaming images in gnarled wood or a montage of a boy being crushed by a mattress.

The resignation for sexual abuse sent waves through the Catholic hierarchy in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of the country, where religion is a powerful cultural influence.

Bishop Vangheluwe, who retreated to a Trappist monastery, remains under investigation by the Belgian authorities in perhaps another child sexual abuse case and accusations that he concealed such complaints lodged against others.

A public pledge by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Brussels that the Bruges resignation marked an end to cover-ups prompted more than 500 people — mostly men — to come forward in just two months.

“For the first time there is a generation of men who are telling that they were sexually abused by men,” said Peter Adriaenssens, a psychiatrist who led an internal church commission on sexual abuse but resigned last month after the police confiscated all his case files.

Mr. Adriaenssens noted that many boys were beaten by parents who disbelieved their complaints. There was, he said, a “silencing of society.”

With so many new potential victims, the police staged extraordinary raids last month, holding bishops for nine hours at the church’s Belgian offices in Mechelen while scouring the premises for hidden material. They drilled into a cardinal’s crypt and confiscated computers and documents, searching for proof that the Church had concealed evidence. [And the Times reporters find nothing unusual, objectionable or absurd in that??? If any other institution vut the Church had been so violated, we would have had a long built-in editorial about 'rampant violation and sacrliege committed on tombs'.]

Bishop Vangheluwe’s nephew remains reluctant to speak extensively about what happened. “I’m scared, and the church has a lot of power,” he said, standing near a wooden image of two heads, one with a mouth carved wide into a scream.

Father Devillé, who was alerted to the bishop’s behavior by a friend of the nephew but had no direct contact with the abused youth, said: “For the nephew, it was impossible to say anything. He didn’t want anyone else to know because there was great pressure in the family to keep silent.”

Father Devillé said the abuse continued for about eight years. When he confronted Cardinal Danneels in 1996, he said, the cardinal listened impatiently, glancing frequently at his watch.

Weeks later, Father Devillé received a letter from the cardinal. “Stop making unfounded public accusations against the church and its functionaries if you don’t have proof,” it read.

[These specific accusation woth detail by a priest against Cardinal Danneels would have provided endless fodder for journalistic outrage of the kind levelled against Cardinal Sodano for general accusations made against him by the NCR reporter Berry and Cardinal Schoenborn. But Danneels has gotten a pass from teh world's media - and from the NYT - so far compared to the presumption of guilt that most MSM have tarred Sodano with.

Both Cardinal Danneels and Cardinal Sodano are entitled to a presumption of innocence until they are proven guilty of charges made against them - not by conjecture or rumor, but by actual facts. Yet Danneels gets a pass because for decades, he was upheld by the MSM and Catholic liberals as a model for what a Pope ought to be!]

Under Belgian law, a sexual abuse victim can lodge a criminal complaint for only up to 10 years after turning 18. The church contends that Bishop Vangheluwe cannot face prosecution because the case is too old.

Cardinal Danneels, who was questioned for 10 hours last Tuesday by the police, said through his lawyer that he did not recall Bishop Vangheluwe’s name mentioned in connection with abuse.

Mr. Adriaenssens, who specializes in working with sexual abuse victims, said he believed that the turning point for the nephew came when a 12-year-old niece took home a holy card with a message from the bishop presented as a remembrance of her confirmation.

“It was a little card with a nice picture on the front and inside text from him on the importance of a healthy childhood,” Mr. Adriaenssens said. “This made him enraged.”

A meeting was arranged in April between the nephew, his family and the bishop of Bruges. But the family was infuriated that the retired Cardinal Danneels was the only other cleric present. They were expecting the newly appointed archbishop to attend, according to Mr. Adriaenssens, who said the family feared that the Church was maneuvering to “silence” it. [And how does the presence of Cardinal Danneels at the meeting serve to 'silence' it? If anything, it should have helped publicize it. Besides, the report itself says that the meeting was supposed be between the family and the bishop of Bruges.]

Those suspicions were rooted deep because Belgian Church officials failed to cooperate with child abuse cases stretching back over many years, according to Godelieve Halsberghe, a retired magistrate who led the internal church commission from 2000 to 2008.

In those eight years, Ms. Halsberghe said, she dealt with 33 cases, with 15 or 16 outstanding when she retired and the other half resolved with compensation for the victims, generally tens of thousands of euros. Church officials said only four cases were left outstanding.

They also said that all cases notified to them after 2001 were passed on to the Vatican in accordance with rules set then by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, named Pope in 2005. She said she dealt only with the Belgian church.

By April 19 this year, the e-mail messages from the nephew’s friend had reached all of Belgium’s bishops. A day later, Mr. Adriaenssens received news of a call from the nephew making a formal complaint to the commission hot line about his uncle. Mr. Adriaenssens called the bishop.

“This is your first moment to be a real priest,” Mr. Adriaenssens said he told him after the bishop admitted responsibility. Within an hour of calls to other commissioners, the view was: The bishop had to resign.

Now Belgian prosecutors and investigators must sort the hundreds of complaints that have emerged since.

Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck said his nation was living through a period of soul-searching similar to what followed the scandal over Marc Dutroux, who was arrested in 1996 and eventually convicted in the kidnapping, torture and sexual abuse of six girls, including four who died even though the police searched his home while some victims were imprisoned there.

“How can you explain that so many people didn’t go to police, didn’t go to justice?” Mr. De Clerck asked.

Mr. Vangheluwe is abiding by an agreement with the conference of bishops that he cannot grant interviews while living in St. Sixtus Abbey here in Westvleteren.

At vespers on Thursday, he stood out among 24 monks in homespun black and white robes. Holding a prayer book turned to Psalm 99, he was a stooped figure in gray trousers, a light short-sleeved shirt and sandals.

After prayers, half of the monks left; Mr. Vangheluwe stayed for an optional 10 minutes of silent contemplation.


About Cardinal Sodano, he will have to speak up for himself soon, because the latest and harshest broadside against him comes in this blog entry by a former editor of the UK's Catholic Herald, who simply assumes Sodano is guilty of all the charges levelled against him.

It is most unworthy of a professional journalist to make this assumption, and above, all un-Christian. But he is right that if, God forbid, Sodano should have to preside at the next pre-Conclave, the Church would suffer immeasurably since the media would simply focus on Sodano's presumed sins!


Cardinal Sodano:
A catastrophe waiting to happen
His sinister record would give the press a field day
if he was left in charge of the next conclave
By William Oddie

Friday, 9 July 2010

Most accounts of Cardinal Schönborn’s recent wigging by the Pope for his criticism of Cardinal Angelo Sodano (for calling accusations of clerical child abuse “petty gossip”) tended to deflect attention from the fact that Sodano himself did not escape criticism.

However wrong Cardinal Schönborn may have been to make his criticisms to journalists and not to the authorities in Rome, the fact is that he was dead right about Sodano. [How can Oddie presume to say this with such certainty????]

The wording of the Vatican’s press release made his real mistake clear: “When accusations are made against a cardinal”, specified the statement, “competency falls exclusively to the Pope”.

After Cardinal Schönborn “clarified” his own remarks, Cardinal Sodano was made to do the same: [No, he was not. The explanation about this word covered both Sodano's use of it and the Pope's earlier use. Oddie is interpreting the Vatican press statement to suit his own purposes, not according to simple fact.]

“The word chiacchiericcio [gossip] was erroneously interpreted [hum, hum] as disrespectful to the victims of sexual abuse, towards whom Cardinal Angelo Sodano nourishes the same feelings of compassion… as … the Holy Father.”

I think not. Cardinal Sodano appears to have an exceptionally sinister record of shielding abusers, particularly eminent ones, which goes back many years. He blocked a 1995 investigation into subsequently proven accusations of child abuse against Schönborn’s predecessor as Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groër. The most shameful episode was his consistent defence over decades of Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ. And, according to reports in the National Catholic Reporter, he had his reasons: he stands accused of receiving a great deal of money and other benefits from the Legion of Christ. In 1998, according to reports, Sodano halted investigations into sexual abuse by Maciel then being carried out by the CDF. [All of these charges that Oddie takes as Gospel truth are hearsay. Even if they are plausible and probable, they are still hearsay, and hearsay is not and has never been proof of guilt.]

One of Pope Benedict’s first actions was to depose Maciel and forbid him to function as a priest.

Cardinal Sodano’s continuing danger to the Church comes from the fact that he is still Dean of the College of Cardinals. This means that if the Pope were to die before he can be removed, Sodano will be in charge of the obsequies (he will preach the panegyric) and of the conclave: and the international press will have a field day, with millions of column inches about his alleged support for child abusers, his corruption and his sheer incompetence. This is a disaster which must not be allowed to happen. Sodano must go, soon.

Unfortunately, Sodano's fellow cardinal-bishops will have to un-elect him as Dean of Cardinals. The Holy Father has no say in this at all. Sodano was elected to replace him as Dean when he was elected Pope. It's a tough test for Sodano.

What are his options? In descending order of personal difficulty and ascending order of selfishness -
1) He can voluntarily resign as Dean (though I am not sure if the rules allow him to do that, unless he decides as Cardinal Gantin did when he retired in 2002 to go home to Benin, paving the way for Cardinal Ratzinger to be elected - since a requirement for the Dean of Cardinals is that he resides in Rome) and give the best reason - that he does not want any shadow cast on that office. This would be an opening for him to state, even if only in general terms, his actions or inaction with respect to Cardinal Groer and Fr. Maciel.

2) He can explain the latter, preferably with specifics, without having to resign as Dean, if it turns out he is 'guiltless'.

3) He can 'tough it out' like Cardinal Law (who accepted a prominent Rome assignment from John Paul II when he could have humbly declined and chosen a more appropriate way to live out his disgraceful resignation as Archbishop of Boston) and have his presumed crimes hang over him and the Church indefinitely like Damocles's sword.

I should think Sodano has enough savvy to know that unless he speaks up for himself about these accusations, there will forever be an unsavory asterisk to his name in the history books.

May the Holy Spirit help him - and other bishops and priests who are in similar moral dilemmas - to make the right decision sooner rather than later!

I'm rather late in posting anything of this, but here are some useful items to bring this thread up to date:


Church of England closer to
approving women bishops
Summary by

July 12, 2010

The Church of England took another step towards ordaining women to the episcopate. At the meeting of their Synod last weekend, they adopted a draft proposal on the question.

In particular, they attempted to placate the conservative faction; priests who do not wish to serve under the authority of a bishopess will have the opportunity to go under the authority of another bishop, according to the BBC.

Now, the Synod shall submit the document for discussion in 43 dioceses of the C of E over the next few weeks, leading British newspapers reported. This consultation could last up to two years, the dioceses would be able to offer amendments [to the proposal], and the proposal along with the submitted amendments would be put to a vote at the General Synod in 2012.

If that vote is positive, the first female bishop in the Church of England could be appointed in 2014. For approval, the document needs the support of at least a two-thirds majority vote in each of the three chambers of the General Synod, bishops, priests, and laity.

In the Church of England since 1994, more than 5,000 women have been ordained priests. Since then, more than 500 priests retired early, which meant that the C of E paid out special compensation totalling 27.4 million pounds.

In 2008, about 1,300 Anglican clergy threatened to leave the church if the Synod gave the green light to women in the episcopate.


Anglicans expect exodus after
Church of England OKs women bishops
By Simon Caldwell


LONDON. July 13 (CNS) -- The largest Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England is expecting an exodus of thousands of Anglicans to Catholicism after a decision to ordain women as bishops without sufficient concessions to traditionalists.

Stephen Parkinson, director of Forward in Faith -- a group that has about 10,000 members, including more than 1,000 clergy -- told Catholic News Service in a July 13 telephone interview that a large number of Anglo-Catholics are considering conversion to the Catholic faith.

His comments came after the General Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, voted at a meeting in York to approve the creation of women bishops by 2014 without meeting the demands of objectors.

A July 12 statement from Forward in Faith advised members against hasty action, saying now was "not the time for precipitate action."

"This draft measure does nothing for us at all," said Parkinson. "We explained very carefully why we could not accept women bishops theologically.

"We explained what would enable us to stay in the Church of England, but the General Synod has decided to get rid of us by giving us a provision that does not meet our needs," he said. "They are saying either put up or shut up and accept innovations, however unscriptural or heretical, or get out."

Parkinson said he expected thousands of members of Forward in Faith to consider accepting Pope Benedict XVI's offer of a personal ordinariate, issued last November in the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, in which a group of Anglicans can be received into the Catholic Church while retaining their distinctive patrimony and liturgical practices.

"Many, I expect, will be exploring the provisions of Pope Benedict's apostolic constitution. We have got 10,000 members, so clearly we are talking about thousands," he added.

A number of breakaway national Anglican churches, in communion with the Traditional Anglican Communion rather than the much larger Worldwide Anglican Communion, have already written to the Vatican to accept the Pope's offer.

The defection of thousands of mainstream Anglican traditionalists from the Church of England would represent the largest single block.

Parkinson said developments were unlikely within the next six months, however, adding that until women bishops are ordained, Anglican traditionalists had a "couple of years" to think about what to do.

The Forward in Faith statement said the proposals must be considered by provincial synods in September and the outcomes could be debated a month later when Forward in Faith holds its annual meeting.

The decision by the General Synod came after nearly 12 hours of debate on a compromise proposed by the Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury and Archbishop John Sentamu of York was narrowly defeated.

The diocesan synods have now been asked to scrutinize a scheme where women bishops would have the authority to make alternative arrangements for objectors through a statutory code of practice.

The Anglo-Catholic group of the synod had wanted episcopal visitors, or "flying bishops," to minister to their members instead, but their requests were rejected.

If the resolution is supported by a majority of the diocesan synods, it will be returned to the General Synod for ratification in 2012.

Archbishop Williams told the General Synod that its vote illustrated that the Church of England was "committed by a majority to the desirability of seeing women as bishops for the health and flourishing of the work of God's kingdom, of this church and this nation."

"We are also profoundly committed by a majority in the synod to a maximum generosity that can be consistently and coherently exercised toward the consciences of minorities and we have not yet cracked how to do that," he said during the July 12 debate.

The Church of England first voted to ordain women as priests in 1992, a move that led to about 500 clergy defecting to the Catholic Church.

Since 1994, when the changes came into force, more than 5,000 women have been ordained as Anglican priests.

Last year, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales set up a committee of bishops to liaise with Anglicans interested in a personal ordinariate, which will resemble a military diocese in structure, and also with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

On July 5, Catholic Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham met about 70 Anglican clerics to discuss the possibility of an English ordinariate.



What does the decision on women bishops
mean for the Church of England?
By Robert Pigott
Religious Affairs Correspondent


It has been clear for several years that the Church of England's synod wanted to ordain women as bishops.

But that left a critical question - what concessions should be made to traditionalists who objected?

During a long weekend of impassioned and sometimes emotional debate, it decided that the concessions being sought came at too high a cost.

Traditionalists had wanted to be able to bypass a woman bishop and bring in a male alternative acceptable to them, to perform important functions such as ordaining new clergy.

But the synod decided that would undermine the authority of women bishops and consign them to "second class" status.

It voted to allow women bishops to decide the identity of any male bishop coming into their dioceses to work, and what he could do.

Traditionalists on the Catholic wing of the Church have long warned that many of them would rather leave than tolerate a situation they regard as deeply wrong.

Their objections include their belief that, as Jesus chose only men to be his apostles and therefore to lead the early Church, women cannot take that role.

On the Protestant wing of the Church, conservative evangelicals insist that the Bible dictates that men should lead - both their own households and the Church.

One traditionalist described the synod's decision as "constructive dismissal".

But there is reason to think that rather fewer clergy will leave the Church than the approximately 450 who did so after women were first ordained as priests in 1994.

Although a legal bar was placed in the way of women's ordination as bishops at that stage, the whole Church could see which way the tide was flowing.

Traditionalists who felt most strongly had the opportunity to leave then, and younger ones have become priests knowing that they might eventually have to serve under women bishops.

But even where bishops, priests and lay people decide to stay, they may become part of a disgruntled minority whose unhappiness could threaten the harmony of the Church.

The synod was not to be swayed and its determination to avoid undermining the authority of women bishops was driven partly by the fear that its attitudes were dangerously out of step with wider society.

Rowan Williams says holding the Church together is "difficult" One liberal priest - Canon Robert Cotton - said he was worried that the Church could turn into a sect, refusing to listen to the wisdom that was available in the outside world.

The argument focussed on part of the legislation providing for exemptions for the Church from the Equality Act 2010.

Because it is the established - or state - church, a parliamentary committee will consider the legislation allowing women bishops to be created.

A lay member of the Synod and former MP, Robert Key, warned that the Church could not count on Parliament to give it the "power to discriminate against women".

Mr Key warned that it could become "a dwindling sect, a privileged minority, a reactionary husk".

But the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, roundly contradicted Mr Key, telling him that when the Church started to follow the dictates of contemporary society, it "would cease to be the Church".

Liberal Anglicans pointed to the loud applause Dr Wright received - some people standing to clap - and suggested that there was a deep-seated reluctance among synod members to adapt to the spirit of the times.

That could become an issue when and if an actively gay bishop is appointed.

Some evangelicals have seen this debate - and its discussion about getting exemptions from being overseen by a bishop you do not like - as a dress rehearsal for a future debate about gay bishops.

Conservative evangelicals have challenged the assumption that the current system of diocesan bishops who control everything within their domain should continue.

They say this system of "mono-episcopacy" is not demanded by the Bible, nor by traditional practice.

The General Synod is up for re-election in the autumn They favour the sort of overlapping jurisdiction that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York seemed to envisage in the compromise plan narrowly defeated by the synod.

It would have meant a sort of "job-share" in traditionalist parishes, with a woman bishop allowing some functions to be carried out by a male alternative who had a large measure of legal independence and autonomy.

Largely because the archbishops gave their personal backing to the plan, it received a majority of the vote in the synod, failing only because the vote took place separately in the three "houses" of bishops, clergy and lay people.

Clergy voted against the plan by a margin of just five votes.

The legislation will now be sent to dioceses for what is almost certain to be their approval and will return to the synod, probably in February 2012.

To become law it will have to achieve a two-thirds majority in each house of the synod.

Given that the synod faces re-election this autumn, that's not a foregone conclusion.

If it overcomes that hurdle, the legislation will go before Parliament, and then to the Queen for the Royal Assent.

The first women bishops might be appointed in 2014.

It will seem a long while since the Church decided 30 years ago that there was no theological reason why women should not take the role.

But Dr Williams was unwilling to allow the synod to feel it had entirely solved the problem.

At the start of the final session of discussion, he reminded members that it was "desperately difficult" to hold the Church together.

He said it was "not the end of the road" for attempts to preserve unity, and said "we are profoundly committed by a majority in the synod to the maximum generosity that can be consistently and coherently exercised towards the consciences of minorities."

"We have not yet cracked how to do that," he said.


Women bishops: Now no one can deny
that the Church of England is Protestant

July 10th, 2010

Tonight the Church of England finally acknowledged something that has been obvious since 1992, when it decided to ordain women priests: that it remains, despite the Oxford Movement, and as John Henry Newman came to believe very firmly, a Protestant Church.

As such, it enjoys the freedom to follow the example of its Reformed counterparts in other countries and ordain women to the highest level of ministry, whatever it chooses to call it. (The fact that England’s established Church calls its senior presbyters “bishops” is a matter of historical accident: had circumstances been diffferent in 1558, it might have gone the way of Scotland.)

Now that this freedom is to be fully exercised, what will happen to Anglo-Catholic traditionalists? Many will quietly, without ever admitting the fact, come to terms with their Protestant identity and stay in the C of E. Others will leave for breakaway Anglican denominations or join the Orthodox.

Those who are exploring the Roman option should not be hurried. It’s wrong to say that anyone forced out of Anglicanism cannot become a good Catholic: many great converts stayed in the C of E for as long as their consciences would permit them. But, once they were Catholics, they recognised that they were no longer Anglicans.

This point would not need spelling out but for the myth that has grown up that the Ordinariate creates “Anglicans in communion with the Holy See”. Nonsense.

What it creates are former Anglicans who worship together in a new juridical structure which allows them to retain elements of their patrimony (which may be as major as adopting an Anglican-influenced translation of the Roman Rite, or as minor as not singing out of tune).

Crucially – and this must be stressed – the Vatican is not prepared to allow liberal elements in the English hierarchy to sabotage the Pope’s Apostolic Constitution.

But every single member of the Ordinariate, clerical and lay, will be a member of the Latin-rite Church governed by the Supreme Pontiff and therefore – though it is not the Church’s preferred term – a Roman Catholic. And I know I speak for many Catholics when I say that they will be very welcome indeed.

These days, it seems. one must look to the Mexican newspapers for revelations about the beleaguered Legionaries. This news item reports something just as 'explosive' as the NCR report of Father Maciel's financial dealings and moral depravity - because it tends to confirm the long-held suspicion that Maciel's top lieutenants were not at all in the dark about his activities... This is a signal warning of the mortal perils of any personality cult in the practice of the Christian religion, when the 'personality' becomes the ultimate yardstick of his follower's behavior. Teh duplicity of the LC hierarchy is too appalling for words!

LC's top two officials
knew all about
Fr. Maciel's double life,
one of them admits
in a 2008 recording
by Carolina Gómez
Translated from

July 14, 2010

Although the leadership of the Legionaries of Christ has insisted that they knew nothing of the double life led by the Congregation founder, Marcial Maciel, and his pederast inclinations, the present
Vicar-General of the LC, Luis Garza Medina, said otherwise in 2008.

In a tape recording disclosed ysterday by Carmen Aristgeui of MVS Noticias, Garza Medina, addressing a meeting with young concecrated persons in Totepec, Oaxaca state, in early 2008, said that at least three of the LC leadership knew of Maciel's sexual deviancies, but they decided not to speak about it.

One of the three, he said was Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, who took over as the LC Superior-General after Maciel retired.

And yet, the statement issued by the LC under Corcuera's signature on March 25, 2010, after a meeting of the territorial leaders, says that it was only in May 2006, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith imposed canonical sanctions on Maciel, that the LC leaders became 'fully aware' of Maciel's offenses. Corcuera even expressed 'surprise' at the CDF revelations.

"It has been a very painful, even traumatic, time for everyone. The sudden revelation of some aspects of the life of our founder - which do not at all correspond with what we experienced with him - caught us all totally by surprise. We were not prepared for it. We have all had to undergo a process of gradually assimilating this - in many cases, necessarily slow, and requiring extraordinary human and spiritual resources in order to cope".

Nonetheless, the transcript of Garza's address published yesterday by the Mexican newspaper indicate that Corcuera's words did not at all correspond to reality.

In the tape, Vicar-General Garza tells the young women, who had vowed chastity, that the founder had "an unstructured sexuality, very unstructured, resulting in a continuous and constant relationship with one woman for 30 years, during which they had a daughter. At the same time, he also had relations with another woman with whom it is probable that he had two sons. He had these simultaneous relations, a bit strange because later the children got to know each other... In his unstructured sexuality, 'our father' also committed homosexual acts even with minors," Garza says in the tape.

Garza further claimed that Maciel - who died in the United States on January 30, 2008, from pancreatic cancer - never sought confession, and as far as he knew, never had one. [Not even before he died????]

Nonetheless, Garza stated that even if Maciel may not have received ab solution, he seemed to have a 'tranquil' conscience. "Think he was at peace".

He also told his audience that after surgery for cancer, when he was prohibited from taking any sugar, Maciel asked for ice cream before he died.

Asked about the recording, Garza said he had nothing to say about it.


To appreciate the catastrophic implications of the tape on the present leadership of the LC, Sandro Magister described this leadership and their ties to Maciel in an article last March where he said that the first step in 'cleaning out' the LC was to dismiss the entire leadership:

---

The cohesion of the leadership group, originating from its decades-long connection with Maciel, endures today in the bond that binds and subordinates everyone to Corcuera, and even more to Garza.

Garza concentrates two key posts in himself. He is vicar general, with control of administration, and he is the director of the congregation's Italian province, headquartered in Rome, where the Vatican is.

He took this second post shortly before the beginning of the apostolic visit, transferring his predecessor, Jacobo Muñoz, to the province of France and Ireland.

But in addition to this, Garza is the creator and absolute master of Grupo Integer, the holding company that acts as treasury and administrative center for all the works of the Legion in the world, with assets totaling an estimated 25 billion euros.

Garza comes from a very wealthy family in Monterrey, which for decades was a major benefactor of Maciel's works and closely connected to another of the general councilors of the Legion, Francisco Mateos. The secretary general, Evaristo Sada, is his cousin.

In addition to being connected to Garza and Corcuera, some of the current directors were very close to the founder for years. Alejandro Ortega, until two years ago the director of one of Mexico's two provinces, was Maciel's personal secretary. Julio Marti, director of the province of the United States and Canada, was superior general of the Legionaries' general headquarters in Rome. Michael Ryan was an old friend of Maciel's family, and a supporter of the the beatification cause of his mother, Maura Degollado Guízar.

In recent days, Garza and Corcuera have closed ranks even more tightly, with a few personnel changes. Emilio Díaz Torre has been appointed director of the province of Monterrey in Mexico. And his predecessor, Leonardo Nuñez, has been entrusted with the province of Brazil.

Both are Mexican, like most of the upper echelon of the Legionaries. The second most privileged nationality is Spanish.

---

Of course, it's hard to say why on earth Garza would have chosen to speak at all about Maciel's misdeeds to a group of young consecrated persons, of all people! Even if the rules of the Legion and its various arms absolutely forbade any member to speak ill of 'our father'. But why did Garza himself violate that sacrosanct rule? It would be nice to know whatever happened to each of those young consecrated persons who heard Garza that day!...Did the apostolic visitators know about this tape at all? Of course, from the summary of their report, it seems they came to learn that the LC leaders did know about Maciel's hidden life and were complicit in it, so they must have had independently corroborated testimony about it.


7/19/10
P.S. I must apologize. In fairness to Fr. Garza, he issued a statement the day after the Mexican reports reiterating that the LC leadership only learned about Father Maciel's sexual behavior after the CDF sanction of 2006. He does not deny giving the recorded speech in 2008 from which he was quoted, but says that he was selectively quoted and the quotations edited to suggest prior knowledge by him and others in the LC leadership.... But I am wondering why Sandro Magister is not following up this story...

Ecumenism: The true story
of a 'war' that never was
The Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople were said to have threatened
a complete break with Rome in 2003. The pretext was the Ukraine.
A source at the Christian Unity Council clears up the misinformation.




ROME, July 19, 2010 – Among the dossiers that Cardinal Walter Kasper has handed over to his successor, Swiss archbishop Kurt Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, one of the most dramatic concerns the Ukraine.

During his visit to Rome last May, the chairman of the department of external relations of the Patriarchate of Moscow and all Russia, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, mentioned the Ukrainian question as the only real obstacle to a meeting between Benedict XVI and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. [The Russians have been consistent about this complaint, which also covers property disputes in the Ukraine, so it's clear no meeting can be expected until this is resolved.]

Less than one month ago, www.chiesa dedicated an entire article to the Ukrainian question:
> Ukraine plays referee between the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1343877?eng=y

Among other things, this article referred to one of the most critical moments of conflict between Rome and Moscow, with Ukraine as the epicenter, which happened between 2003 and 2004. The object of contention was the elevation to the status of Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, which was strongly desired by that same Church.

But it is intolerable for Russian ecclesiology, for which no "Roman" patriarchate can exist in a territory where an Orthodox patriarchate already exists.

In fact, this is just how Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople began a bitter letter to John Paul II dated November 29, 2003:

"I would like to draw your attention to a very serious question […]. It is the matter in particular of your intention of setting up the [Greek-Catholic] Patriarchy in the Ukraine, an intention that has been communicated to our brother Alexis Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia by Your Cardinal Walter Kasper, as the Patriarch of Moscow informed me."

After a long argument, Bartholomew I concluded that if the new Greek-Catholic patriarchate were to become a reality, it would be a catastrophe for the ecumenical movement.

But is that how things really happened? Did Cardinal Kasper really write to the Patriarch of Moscow, who at the time was Alexei II, announcing Rome's decision to elevate the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church to a patriarchate? And did Kasper really have to go running to Moscow to retract the announcement?

An authoritative source at the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity has provided www.chiesa with a reconstruction very different from the one that emerges from Bartholomew I's letter:

---

It is not true that Cardinal Kasper announced in a letter to the Patriarch of Moscow the elevation of the senior archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, to the rank of Patriarch.***

Such a letter, with an announcement of such significance, would have been possible only with the authorization of the Pope, which was never given.

In a previous meeting of cardinals, Kasper was not the only one to have expressed serious reservations about such a step: even then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put his objections in writing.

Kasper's letter to Moscow contained only a few reflections on the history and canonical status of the patriarchates from the Catholic point of view, reflections identical to those formulated by Cardinal Ratzinger.

But the Patriarchate of Moscow either misunderstood the letter, or, more probably, used it to urge other Orthodox patriarchates to write letters of protest to Rome, the most blistering of which was the one by Bartholomew I.

Bartholomew was under pressure from Moscow, and wanted to show in this way that he, and not Alexei II, was the real 'ecumenical' leader of Orthodoxy.

Pope John Paul II, in his prudent response to the Patriarch of Constantinople, declared his 'surprise' at what he had found written in the letter, and invited Bartholomew I to Rome.

The visit took place, proceeded very peacefully, and no mention was even made of the controversy concerning the Ukrainian patriarchate: absolute silence, as if it had never happened.

Even Bartholomew I never revisited the question, making it seem that not he but others had written that letter dated November 29, 2003, very erudite from the viewpoint of traditional Orthodox historiography.

---

The same source from the Christian Unity council also wanted to correct another passage in the article from www.chiesa, where it says that the chill between Rome and Moscow lasted until the end of John Paul II's pontificate, to be thawed only afterward, with the new Pope:
It isn't so. After the incident mentioned above, Cardinal Kasper went to Moscow several times and the climate between the two sides began to improve.

The real breakthrough was in 2004, when the Pope brought [sent, not brought - because John Paul II never went to Moscow nor met with Alexei] the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan to the Patriarch of Moscow, accompanied by a very friendly exchange of letters between John Paul II and Alexei. This was the gesture that broke the ice.

And so it was that almsot all the Orthodox Patriarchates, including Moscow, were represented at John Paul II's funeral and the enthronement of Pope Benedict XVI - something that had never taken place in the whole long history since the Great Schism.

So the terrain of relations with Moscow and with the other Orthodox patriarchates was already well prepared at the beginning of the new pontificate.

On Moscow's part, there were other reasons for a change of attitude, with the new Pope. The fact that John Paul II was Polish, while his successor is German, is certainly one of these reasons, but entirely marginal in this context.


The article from "30 Days" with the extremely harsh letter from Bartholomew I to John Paul II, dated November 29, 2003:
> And Bartholomew wrote to the Pope...
www.30giorni.it/us/articolo.asp?id=2856


***I think Mr. Magister should have independently researched the actual status of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, more formally known as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), and its current head, Cardinal Husar.

I do not know how accurate Wikipedia is in this but it says that in the Ukraine, "Pope Paul VI... compromised with the creation of a new title of major archbishop, with a jurisdiction roughly equivalent to that of a patriarch in an Eastern church. This title has since passed to... Lubomyr Husar in 2000; this title has also been granted to the heads of three other Eastern Catholic Churches."

The official website of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church itself does not mention the word 'Patriarchate' at all in reference to itself, but consistently uses the title Major Archbishop for its leaders since the Church resurfaced from its underground status during much of the Communist era.

Since Rome itself does not refer to Cardinal Husar as Patriarch but as Major Archbishop, one assumes Moscow accepts the compromise, in the same way that the Roman Catholic Archbishop in Moscow is not called Archbishop of Moscow, nor is his jurisdiction the 'Archdiocese of Moscow' - instead his title is Archbishop of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception... What fictions the Church has to live with to keep the peace with Moscow!

In the BENEDICT thread, I posted a very informative recent article by George Weigel about the very confusing religious situation among the Christian churches in the Ukraine.
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=85272...



As it turns out, there is a major news peg for Magister's article above which I am surprised he does not refer to at all:


Patriarch Kirill’s 3rd visit
to the Ukraine starts tomorrow -
with an eye on the Vatican
by Nina Achmatova



Moscow, July 19 (AsiaNews) – Like a year ago, Patriarch Kirill I has chosen to celebrate the Baptism of Rus [the beginning of Christianity in Russia] in the Ukraine itself.

The visit, which begins tomorrow, will last until 28 July, a day recently elevated to the status of national holiday in Russia. It underscores the crucial role the Ukraine plays in the politics of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Patriarch’s trip is especially important since it comes after pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych succeeded pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko as Ukrainian President.

The celebration is highly symbolic since the baptism of ancient Russia (Rus) occurred in what is now Ukraine. Only a year ago, the Russian Parliament (Duma) passed a law recognising it as a national holiday.

On that day in the summer of 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev gathered the inhabitants on the shores of the Dnieper River in the summer of 988 AD for mass baptism by Byzantine priests.

The event set in motion the long process of Christianisation of Russia and it is highly significant as a symbol of Slavic unity, which the Patriarch has referred to in the past.

“Dear Ukrainians, in the past you contributed to the creation of the Empire and the Russian Church. The Empire that once was, and that shall be, will be partly yours. You tried to go west, but you found nothing good there. However, if we are united, we can stop being horses and can start being horsemen. Let us move in that direction,” Patriarch Kirill said in a message to the Ukrainians on the eve of his visit.

"Together, Russia and Ukraine", he said, "we preserve unity as a nation. We're joining the family of other European nations not as a guided nation hanging upon words of the other, stronger partner, but as equal partners, bearers of our own historic and cultural code."

The patriarch also used the occasion to stress the community of view between the Patriarchate and Pope Benedict XVI. “The Pope’s views are reasons for optimism . . . . On many social and moral issues, his approach coincides with that of Russian Orthodox Church. This will give us an opportunity to defend Christian values together, in particular in the international community.”

This is Kirill’s third visit to the Ukraine since his election in January 2009. His first trip in August 2009 led to protests by supporters of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

In Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church has to cope with strong conflicts among existing Orthodox Churches, of which there are three: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church loyal to the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC).

The Moscow Patriarchate recognises only the UOC-MP, but last year, Kirill did show some openness towards the other two Churches. Atll three however are united in opposition to the Greek Catholic Church of the Ukraine (UGCC) [also known as the Ukrainian Catholic Church].

The election of a pro-Russian president, Yanukovych, opened the door to intra-Orthodox dialogue, which might lead to possible unification.

Viktor Elenski, an Orthodox Church expert at the Ukrainian Institute of Philosophy, said that in the Ukraine, “the ideas about Slavic unity promoted by the Patriarch have a great following” but “are seen more in political than in spiritual terms.”

“The Moscow Patriarchate follows Russian (government) policy and the Patriarch’s visit has contributed to the polarisation of the country” between the pro-Russian eastern Ukraine and pro-West nationalists (mostly found in western Ukraine).

“We have a saying,” Elenski said, “to explain the situation. Ukraine needs two visits from the US President and no more than one from that of Russia, because after the latter, there will be certainly little to do.”

For the Ukraine Catholics' version of their history, check their site on
www.ugcc.org.ua/?L=2


Happily out of the confusion is the Roman Catholic Church of the Ukraine in the Archdiocese of Lviv (Lvov), western Ukraine, headed by Archbishop 'Mietek' Mocryzski - a region that has always been culturally more Polish than Ukrainian.

Cardinal Newman was much more
than a 'reluctant saint'
'Newman's Unquiet Grave' by John Cornwell
is a highly readable attempt to understand John Henry Newman
By Charles Moore

19 Jul 2010


Announcing the details of the Pope's forthcoming visit to Britain a couple of weeks ago, the BBC said that Benedict XVI would be beatifying "a 19th-century cardinal".

The description was accurate, but misleading, rather like referring to Alfred Tennyson as "a 19th-century peer". The man in question was never a bishop and only became a Cardinal in his late seventies. His interest lies elsewhere.

But one can see the BBC's difficulty. How could one quickly describe John Henry Newman? The most important Catholic convert in the history of the English-speaking world? The best Romantic writer of the Victorian age? The most influential spiritual leader in England since John Wesley? All these, perhaps, and more.

In the subtitle of this book, John Cornwell calls Newman "the reluctant saint", which is not a terribly useful epithet, since no one who was not reluctant could possibly qualify for sainthood.

There is a bit of an "agenda" behind this book, I suspect. ['A bit of an agenda...I suspect'???' Cornwell made his mark earlier by books insinuating all sorts of dark and treacherous misdeeds in the Vatican, most notably Hitler's Pope against Pius XXI, and A Thief in the Night about the death of JJohn Paul I.]

Cornwell is clearly on the reforming wing of the Catholic Church, and he wishes to enlist Newman as a prophet of that cause. Newman's belief in the primacy of conscience, says Cornwell, can be used to uphold attacks on Vatican teaching on contraception. His liberal idea of a university is taken to imply that he might have favoured student protest against the Vietnam war. [It's not the first time a dead historical personage has been exploited by a writer to push his personal and ideological agenda.]

But don't let that put you off. This book is a highly readable attempt to convey why Newman was, and remains, a fascinating figure. It overcomes the problem for the new reader that Newman engaged prolifically for nearly 70 years in controversies and religious inquiries many of which, even at the time, seemed obscure. It explains why, then and now, his words and his story enraptured hearts and minds.

That phrase is a cliché, but I use it deliberately, because Newman was very interested in both the heart and the mind, and the link between the two. He was learned, and never avoided intellectual rigour. His power of pure argument was prodigious. But he was also fascinated by how it is that a human being comes to understand and to love; particularly, to understand and love God.

Nowadays, people like to distinguish between "style" and "substance" (and when you think of modern politics, you can see why), but Newman understood that the style "of a really gifted mind" cannot "belong to any but himself".

It follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal. You cannot have mere abstraction: "A man's moral self is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in the tips of his fingers, and the spring of his insteps."

So, as the possessor of what Cornwell calls "benign Romantic egotism", Newman naturally saw autobiography as the most arresting way of conveying the human encounter with the divine.

That is why 'Lead, Kindly Light', written after he had nearly died in Sicily as a young man, is his most famous hymn, and why the Apologia is his most popular book. As a child, he wrote, he did not believe much in the "reality of material phenomena", but preferred to "rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator".

That luminosity never left him. And although he was in many ways a conservative, he had a surprisingly modern sense of how faith can vanish, making the world seem a hopeless place.

He had a unique gift for relating this sense to human experience: "If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator."

He had the same gift for identifying happier experiences: he wrote that arriving at religious certitude was like being "a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself… leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another". Newman did everything he could to leave his own track behind, and to teach.

This image of dangerous movement towards truth ("o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent") also helps explain Newman's continuing importance.

His life was a painful pilgrimage. As a young don at Oxford, he saw himself as being like the snapdragon growing up the wall of his college, and never wanted to leave, but his spiritual quest forced him out.

He began as an evangelical, became a High Anglican and then converted to Rome. By becoming a Catholic, he lost his place at Oxford (then an Anglican institution) forever. People sometimes speak of conversion to Catholicism as "coming home", but Newman never found it so. Its truth he believed; its habits he found foreign.

Many people also think of religious belief, especially Catholicism, as a form of imprisonment. Newman's story is one that points in the opposite direction. His search for God expressed and produced freedom.

The present Pope is known to admire Newman, and I do hope that, when he comes, he will say exactly why. [Among other things, the preceding sentence about the freedom that religion bestows - a concept often expressed by Benedict XVI!]

He has chosen as the slogan for his visit the motto which Newman took when he became a cardinal: "Heart speaks unto heart." It is the same idea, as Cornwell reminds us, which Beethoven wrote on the score of his Mass in D: "From the heart – may it go to the heart again."

A lengthy article by Sandro Magister today on the situation in China
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1344197?eng=y
reminded me I had been putting off posting a recent excellent article in Ignatius Insight about the same subject, but based on an actual interview with China's oldest living bishop. He is someone I have admired since an interview he gave to 30 GIORNI 2-3 years ago, because he demonstrates how it is possible for a bishop to have good relations with the Chinese government while being loyal to the Vatican and the Pope.

Because this article is based on the actual experience of decades of the Bishop of Shanghai, I find it more congenial than Magister's, which sticks with conjecturing about the incompatibility of the 'official' and 'underground' churches in China, according to Cardinal Zen and AsiaNews, who are intransigent on this issue; and is skeptical about the cautious optimism of the Vatican Secretariat of State about recent events in which the Chinese government has ccoperated with the Vatican about new bishops.

It seems to me Bishop Jin is living the spirit of Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 letter - and was living it before the letter was written.




July 23, 2010


Editor's Note: Dr. Anthony E. Clark, Assistant Professor of Asian History at Whitworth University (Spokane, Washington), spent six weeks this summer traveling and researching in China. The following interview was given last week, shortly before Dr. Clark traveled to Hong Kong, where he interviewed Cardinal Zen. That interview, with Cardinal Zen, will appear on the Catholic World Report website in the near future.




Towering above Shanghai's St. Ignatius Cathedral is the recently built chancery of the diocese, and on the fourth floor of this imposing structure is the personal residence and greeting hall of China's most powerful aboveground bishop, the ninety-four-year-old Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian, S.J.

While millions of tourists pour into the city's World Expo each day to get a taste of the future, the elderly Bishop Jin sits above it all as a vestige of China's past, pre-and-post Communism.

The business people who occupy Shanghai's swank new Pudong skyscrapers and the bustling young jetsetters on the Bund are largely unaware of, or don't really care about, the city's Catholic scene; it's quite small in proportion to the rising megalopolis'S materialist crowd little concerned with the vicissitudes of politics and religion.

But on the landscape of world Christianity, Bishop Jin has become a towering figure, not unlike his new chancery, accessible only through layers of watchmen and coded, locked doors.

After passing through one of Shanghai's hippest shopping centers and bastion of modern Chinese materialism, once the center of the city's Catholic community, I was ushered into the private residence of Bishop Jin.

He is surprisingly lucid and energetic for a man nearing a century old and suffering from diabetes. He is one of the Church's most enigmatic men, and one often wonders if what he is saying is a direct truth or a circuitous statement, a result of his years of dealing with Communist officials who hold an ever-tighter grasp on his movements as China's most public prelate.

He has granted countless interviews in the past, and I met him only a week after researching in the China Province Jesuit Archives, where his name is woven through the history of the Society's work in China. Bishop Jin was unusually candid with me, though I know from experience how vigilant one must be in Mainland China when discussing the government's role in religious matters.

Shanghai's Catholic churches are very different from those in the rest of China; they host more foreigners – and thus collect more foreign money – and are in much better condition than more rural parishes elsewhere.

Jin's mark is indelibly evident on the Shanghai Church, for he has received more foreign monetary help than any other Chinese bishop, and has situated the diocese's finances in such way that it is independently solvent. And he is quite proud of this success.

Some wonder, however, how much government cooperation facilitated the impressive restoration of his diocese after the human purges and pillaging of Church property during the Cultural Revolution. Whatever Jin did to make Shanghai China's most powerful diocese, some suggest, is less important than the fact that he did it.

For the less-powerful but fervent underground community in Shanghai, however, nothing less than unwavering obedience and support for the Vatican is acceptable, and Shanghai is today a penetrating example of how divided the Church in China can be.

There is a little known reality involving Shanghai: Bishop Aloysius Jin is not the main bishop of the diocese, and in a country that has officially illegalized Catholic orders, he is not China's only Jesuit bishop.

In fact, the principal bishop of Shanghai according to the Vatican is Fan Zhonglian, S.J., another Jesuit, and Jin is his coadjutor. This of course is not his official status according to China's government; official documents mention ONLY Bishop Jin as the Ordinary of the diocese.

Whenever you ask a Chinese bishop or priest about the state of the Chinese Church you hear: "It's complicated."

Bishop Jin is complicated, and he admits it. The nature of his own complexities, he says, is how he makes it all work. During the government attacks on the Shanghai Catholic community in the 1950s, both Fr. Jin Luxian and then-Bishop Gong Pinmei (Cardinal Kung) were arrested and placed in prison for refusing to follow the Party line.

Many Catholics now wonder how Bishop Jin, who spent decades suffering in a state prison for resisting Party pressures, has been so successful in Shanghai in China if he hasn't somehow changed his approach.

After presenting Bishop Jin with a few rare photographs of the Jesuit mission in the 1950s, we began to discuss the general setting of the Chinese Church today and how he has navigated through the intricacies of being a Catholic bishop in a Communist country. He said:

"Yes, it is very complicated here, and I have had to be, how do you say, both a serpent and a dove. I am both a serpent and a dove. The government thinks I'm too close to the Vatican, and the Vatican thinks I'm too close to the government. I'm a slippery fish squashed between government control and Vatican demands. When I got out of prison the Church here was in ruins; after I replaced my predecessor [Bishop Aloysius Zhang Jiashu, S.J. – consecrated illicitly], I wrote hundreds of letters to Catholics all over the world asking for money to restore the Catholic community here in Shanghai. Most of my money came from Germany – some came from America and other European countries.

"I received nothing from the Vatican. I tried to get the prayer for the Pope restored in the Missale Romanum. At that time the government forbade us from two things: we could not implement the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council – this would have been viewed as capitulating to the Vatican – and we were forbidden from reciting the prayer for the Pope during Mass.

"As far as the government was concerned the Church in China was entirely independent from Rome. I made ten trips to Beijing to ask the authorities to allow us to pray for the Pope in Mass, but they were against it.

"So, since we had to use the old Mass I contacted a German friend and asked him to save as many volumes of the Missale Romanum as he could – this was after the Council and everyone was throwing them away. He sent me more than 400 discarded books with the prayer for the Pope in them, which I distributed. I also had new copies printed in Shanghai and sent them out for use elsewhere. I succeeded. This is when the Pope's name was openly mentioned again in the Mass."

Despite his often-valiant resistance to state control over the actions of the Church, I noted that he is still called China's "patriotic bishop." I asked for an example of how he has used his position to gain more freedom from the Patriotic Association for the Church in his diocese.

"I'm not a 'patriotic bishop'; I'm just a Catholic bishop. Look, I had a recent book published ABOUT the Diocese of Shanghai, and the Patriotic Association does not appear in it once. In fact, when the Patriotic Association office moved temporarily away from the cathedral and chancery, I quickly occupied the space for another use. So, when they wanted to move back there was no place for them – Shanghai thus does not have a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association."

Perhaps one of the most openly criticized of Bishop Jin's positions is his view that the underground Church should converge with the state-sanctioned Church. Jin seems to advocate the complete dissolution of the underground community.

Some analysts, including myself, have suggested that China's official and underground Churches are becoming less distinct, an opinion that Jin adamantly disagrees with. He also renders several somewhat acrid criticisms of Cardinal Joseph Zen's open recommendation that the underground Church remain underground. Bishop Jin says:

"No, it is not at all true in China right now that the line between us and the underground is disappearing. In fact, the division is growing worse. Few people really understand that we in the sanctioned Church suffer more because we are completely in the open – subject to the government's constant scrutiny.

"First, let me outline the situation in general terms. Some people think that the underground Church is the true Catholic Church in China, and that they are the only ones truly loyal to the Pope. They also state that they are more obedient than the sanctioned community. This is largely untrue – actually, the government knows where we are at all times – we live under enormous pressure to acquiesce to Party demands.

"The underground community is on the other hand free to move around at will. You know, according to canon law a priest must remain under the jurisdiction of the diocesan Ordinary, but the underground clergy float around all over China at will with great freedom; is this obeying Church law?

"And, when the Pope wrote his recent letter to China it was the official community that responded with careful obedience to the letter. The underground have almost completely ignored it. Is this obedience to the Pope?

"Also, when the Pope called for the two Catholic communities in China to heal our differences and work as one Church, Cardinal Zen in Hong Kong encouraged the underground Church to remain firm in their opposition to the sanctioned community. Is this what the Pope wants?"

In Bishop Jin's view, the chasm between the two divided communities will remain until after the eras of Cardinal Zen and Mr. Liu Bainian, the chairman of the Patriotic Association, come to a close.

"These two men are obstacles in the Chinese Church right now, and until they are gone we will still be unable to reconcile the line between the underground and aboveground communities. As long as Liu wants the Church here to be entirely independent some Chinese Catholics will remain underground, and as long as Cardinal Zen tells the underground to remain separate there will be no unity."

I redirected our discussion toward the sufferings endured by Catholics in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and Bishop Jin's expression became solemn as though this were a subject with raw emotional attachments.

He simply remarked that, "During the Cultural Revolution many, many holy men and women suffered and were killed, but this is a subject better left to a later time. Now is not a prudent time to discuss these things." And finally I asked if there might be something he wished could be conveyed to the Pope.

"I would first of all say, 'Thank you. Thank you for understanding China's Catholics, as you showed in your recent letter.' The letter the Pope wrote to the Church in China was beautiful.

"I would additionally tell him that we love him. We love him and pray for him. We have been praying for him especially through his recent difficulties; the Church in China is on his side. The Church in China prays for him, and the diocese of Shanghai prays for him.

"Finally I would tell him that despite the little help we have received from Rome, I still serve the Vatican. I am still loyal to the Vatican. I am so happy with this Pope; I think he deeply understands the Church in China. He should use more discretion, however, when listening to the advice of some outside bishops. The situation here is complex."

He continued to offer some personal reflections on particular persons who figured in Shanghai's painful Catholic history, touching affectionately on the former Cardinal Gong, who has become a banner of heroism within the underground Church.

They had been old friends before their imprisonment; Gong sat beside Jin during their official "trial." In the end, the predominant themes of Bishop Jin's remarks in this interview centered on how much the Church has improved since his official installment as Shanghai's bishop and how he believes that the underground community should surface to join the recognized Church.

This latter point Jin freely admits is contrary to the position of Cardinal Zen, who was also raised in the Shanghai diocese.

The complexities surrounding Bishop Aloysius Jin must be viewed in light of the complexities of his life and context. It has not been easy for him; it was not easy for all Catholics who faced government persecutions after 1949.

Thanks to Jin's tireless efforts Shanghai currently boasts a vibrant Catholic community with a well-appointed and attended seminary, and large number of restored and dynamic churches. While some say this was all accomplished through compromise, others praise his shrewdness as beneficial to the Church.

He is a warm and welcoming and affable man, but he is also uncommonly judicious, for in China there are no easy answers. Catholic bishops, both underground and official, are forced to navigate through uncertain waters; they are compelled to be both serpents and doves.

As I left Bishop Jin's residence he told me: "I was born during the reign of Pope Benedict XV, and I'll probably die during the reign of Pope Benedict XVI. I've lived my life framed between two good Popes, and I hope I've been a good bishop."


Sunday Mass at the restored St. Peter's Church, attended mostly by foreigners, in Shanghai.

The newly renovated interior of the shrine of Our Lady of Sheshan, outside Shanghai, but still within Bishop Jin's jurisdiction.

This is a companion piece to the above article on the Bishop of Shanghai.




July 2010


Hong Kong remains Asia’s most modern city, bursting with people and rising materialism. Nestled within the island’s network of winding roads, steep escalators, and soaring skyscrapers is a small building that houses a community of modest Salesians who serve the poor and educate the young after the example of St. John Bosco. It is difficult to imagine when first arriving at this unassuming community that it is the home of China’s most prominent and outspoken Catholic prelate, Cardinal Joseph Zen, S.D.B.

After being granted a private interview, Father Paul Mariani, S.J. and I awaited His Eminence downstairs in his residence at the Salesian House of Studies. Cardinal Zen joined us, adjusted the air conditioning, and informed us that he was feeling “a bit unwell” that day. Despite his illness, he was generous with his time, and lived up to his reputation of honesty and candor regarding the situation of the Church in China.

Zen served as bishop of Hong Kong from 2002 to 2009, and was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. When asked in a previous interview whether he intended to rest in his retirement, he answered: “I am retiring, but I’m not going to stop working for the Chinese Church.”

It is clear that Cardinal Zen is a deeply pious laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, and that his heart is unflinchingly committed to improving the status of China’s long-suffering Catholic community. He is perhaps the most informed man alive today regarding what transpires among the Christians who live within the Great Wall.

Our discussion began with a reflection on Tertullian’s statement that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. We asked Cardinal Zen why it is that China has produced a comparatively large number of Christian martyrs in its history, and why persecution against Catholics persists so strongly today.

He responded, “When we talk about the situation in China, we are talking about the persecution under the Communist regime.” He noted that while Communism is in principle the same everywhere, it has different characteristics depending on the country in which it exists.

“China is fundamentally a place where Christians are the minority,” and in China the Christian mission “has been considered imperialist,” according to Zen. Thus, the Communist persecution of Christians in China has been “cruel and pitiless.” Also, since “China’s Communist regime is an ‘improved edition’ of Communism,” control there over religion is particularly tight.

We asked why it is that while the Chinese government wants the Catholic community to be indigenous, it nonetheless suppresses the veneration of the Chinese saints canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. [It's a dictatorship! They can be as arbitrary as they please. They do not have to be logical. All they want to do is protect their general strategy on religions, which is to control them. Is anyone laboring under the delusion that 12 million Catholics in a country of 1.2 billion can have any weight at all on a temporal timescale? ]

Zen noted that “you never know what’s in the mind of the Communist government in China”; it is “very secretive” about its proceedings. But, he said, after the Vatican’s announcement that the canonizations would take place, the authorities asked Catholics “to sign a document against the Pope.”

He also recalled that the decision to hold the canonization ceremony on October 1, China’s national day, “was, of course, a big mistake.” Choosing the day that China celebrates the beginning of its Communist government to canonize Catholic saints was viewed by the Party as an intentional insult.

And due to the government’s control over the Church’s activities, “very few Chinese Catholics are aware of the 120 canonized martyrs,” Zen stated.

Another problem China’s Church faces is rising nationalism. Cardinal Zen insists that Chinese Catholics remain Chinese, “just like before.” The Church, he said, does not threaten Chinese identity.

Regarding the Mainland’s escalating nationalism, Zen maintains that the first thing to bear in mind is that Chinese and Western cultures are in fact quite different. “The missionary coming here brings his own nationality, and in spite of all the efforts he makes he is still a foreigner. You should not be scandalized by this.”

Nonetheless, “The missionaries brought the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas with them when they came to China. What’s wrong with this? They brought the best of the Church with them.” While nationalism grows more extreme, the cardinal maintains that Westerners and Chinese are in the end different, and that both should honor each other’s gifts.

When asked why the canonized Chinese martyr-saints date only as recent as 1930, Cardinal Zen responded that perhaps the Vatican “did not want to irritate the Communist government.”

But Zen wondered, “Why should we not publicize all those martyrs who died under the Communists?” And he added, “People here don’t dare to publish. They say, ‘We wait for better times.’ But I would say, ‘When would there be “better times”? Now is the better time.”’

Zen calls on Catholics who suffered through the anti-Christian cruelties of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to recount their stories. And he also exhorts scholars to write histories of what happened. Zen suggested that it is a pity that Catholics do not publish now, while persecution is still rampant in China; “now is when people need encouragement.”

“Martyrdom means ‘witness,’” he said, and China’s martyrs — those who are canonized and those whose stories are not yet known — must be written about and discussed in order to strengthen the faith of those who suffer today under mistreatment.

We asked Cardinal Zen about the current situation of the “underground” and “above-ground” Catholic communities; while some have said that the line between them is disappearing, many Chinese priests and bishops today assert the opposite—that the division between them is growing more intense. Zen said:

Between 1989 and 1996 I was living in China six months a year teaching in the seminaries of the open Church, and my conclusion as I taught at the Shanghai seminary was that they are Catholics, just like the Catholics anywhere else in the world.

And so I told people that they should not think that the underground is loyal and the open Patriotic Church has betrayed the faith. No, not at all.

At a synod I told the bishops that there is only one Church in China, because in their hearts [Chinese Catholics] have the same faith. But if you look from the structural point of view, how they are run, it is clear that you have two separate Churches.

The underground Church is beyond the law. It has a kind of freedom, and it doesn’t accept the control of the government. But the open Church is still held tightly under the government’s power. So, surely you cannot say that the line is disappearing.

Some people say that the underground should surface. That’s absolutely wrong. It’s not in the letter of the Holy Father [to the Catholics of China, published in 2007], and this view has been clarified in the footnotes of the [letter’s] compendium [published in 2009]. The Holy Father was talking about a reconciliation of hearts, not a merger into one system.
[I posted the relevant part of the Holy Father's letter in the story of the China situation today in the BENEDICT thread. IMHO, Cardinal Zen's interpretation is disingenuous and dictated by his own hard line against 'compromising' in any way with the government.

But when the Pope points out that each community must decide what to do and that everyone should abide by whatever consensus is reached by the community, he is clearly saying the two 'churches' can integrate within the community if there is such a consensus. In which he must surely have considered workable compromises such as those in the dioceses of Beijing and Shanghai.]

If the government’s control of the open Church is so imposing, Zen asked, “Why should the underground surrender to the open Church?” After all, he stated, “They have suffered for so long, and to suddenly surrender is not at all a fair expectation.”

Cardinal Zen’s directness is often disparaged, but he says that he is not concerned with popularity; he is, like Pope Benedict XVI, a man committed to the truth.

“When in China, if anybody talks against the underground I will defend the underground, and if anybody talks against the open Church I will defend the open Church, because they are all under persecution.”

Unfortunately, Zen suggested, “The Holy Father’s generosity in legitimizing the bishops of the open Church has not born the fruits it was supposed to produce.”

“This was a compromise from both sides,” Zen explained. “The Holy Father recognized and approved [these government-selected bishops] without demanding any acts of rebellion against the government [But why would the Pope 'demand any acts of rebellion against the government???] , and on the other hand, the government accepted this without punishing the bishops who were endorsed by the Pope.”

So, Zen asks, why do the two communities remain so divided? “A solution can be found… so it is really beyond my understanding why it is still the same. I blame those bishops in China who are not following the will of the Church’s leaders, but rather only wish to follow their own advantage.”

Another problem is that many of those bishops approved by the Pope are not strong. And, Zen states, “Even some who are in communion with Rome will say in their speeches, ‘I want an independent Church.’ How can they say they are in communion with the Holy Father? This is incredible.”

Cardinal Zen, himself deeply committed to the Vatican, calls upon his fellow bishops in China to be undivided, to follow Rome without equivocation. This, he insists, is what it means to be an “authentic bishop in the Catholic Church.”

We asked Cardinal Zen whether he felt that the Pope’s letter to China actually removed the underground Church’s raison d’être, in light of the Pope’s suggestion that being “underground” is not the normal way the Church functions. Has the Pope’s statement somehow created new confusions in the Chinese Church?

Zen says no, asserting that in China, “Catholics are scandalized that official bishops who have been recognized by the Pope are still on the side of the government.”

He stated that the Pope has not in fact asked the underground Church to surface and join the Patriotic Church, but rather has highlighted the extremity of China’s abnormal situation. The cardinal proposes that the underground community has good cause to be suspicious of the sanctioned Church, though this view has received some criticisms. To his critics he says:

---

People say, “Who are you, Cardinal Zen? You live in a peaceful environment and you push your brothers to martyrdom.” I don’t push anyone to martyrdom; martyrdom is a special grace from God. But I think that if you are a bishop you must be coherent with your faith. The most important thing to the Communists is control, and they have found a way to control the Church in China through the Patriotic Association.

---

When asked to elaborate on how the Patriotic Church is controlled in China, Cardinal Zen pointed to Liu Bainian, the current vice chairman of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. Zen affirms that Liu is perhaps one of the most significant factors in the government’s efforts to control China’s Catholics.

“For many years [Liu] has been head of the whole Chinese Church, and the bishops are really just his slaves,” Zen expalined. “At dinners with Mr. Liu and the bishops, Liu is the only one who talks. But when he goes away everyone can speak; this is very humiliating. Some, however, consider him a saint. What can we do? It’s amazing.”

When asked about detractors who claim that Liu and Zen are two extremes who keep the Chinese Church divided, the cardinal responded:

---

They are not wrong. We really are two extremes. He [desires] the whole Chinese Church to remain in a state of separation from Rome; he has pushed for the illicit ordination of bishops, and he pushed for the 50-year celebration of the Patriotic Association. We even have evidence that many things he does go beyond what the government orders. When the government calls for five bishops to attend a Chinese synod, Liu sends a sixth. The government cannot be happy about this.

---

Cardinal Zen stated that it would help the situation in China if the bishops would simply begin to honor the Holy Father’s recent letter to the Chinese Church. “I cannot understand how it is that so many people do not take his letter seriously; some even give the letter a distorted interpretation.”

Despite the serious problems facing the Church in China, the number of Catholics continues to rise. One wonders what the Church there is doing right.

“It is no surprise,” Zen says, “that people find consolation in Christianity when China is in such a disordered state.”

He also asks the world to bear in mind that “Chinese Christians are still a very small minority,” and that people “should not be overly demanding of the Chinese Church at this time.”

He says, “The Chinese Church today has to fight for survival, unlike the Church in other parts of the world. But despite its need to fight for survival it manages to evangelize and offer charitable services.” [Who is managing to do that? If Cardinal Zen means the underground church, then it obviously has enough freedom to evangelize and bear witness, which means to come out in the open. But if it is maintained that the underground Church has to remain underground for safety, then the evangelization and charitable work is done by the 'official' church which means it is doing something right. The testimony of Shanghai's Bishop Jin in the post above surely means something!]

Finally, we asked Cardinal Zen what Catholics outside of China can do for the Chinese Church. His answer was quite simple:

I think the first thing is to get to know the Church in China. The pity today is that there are many people who know about what is happening in China but do not talk, and many people who do talk about China’s Catholics but do not really know anything. People must know the reality — the true reality of the situation. Today there’s too much confusion — too much confusion.

Though I am obviously an outsider who has no firsthand knowledge of thhe situation at all, I do not see why the Pope's recommendations on promoting unity among Chinese Catholics cannot be followed. It's not as if a workable integration has not been worked out at all between underground anf official communities.

If enough leaders of the 'underground' Church decide to evaluate their local situation wisely and see whether they can come to a modus vivendi with their fellow Catholics in the open Church if they come out, there would be less confusion. By all accounts, active persecution is mostly a function of the local officials in power - most are generally lenient or passive as long as no one causes 'scandal' (as even the Pope warns in his letter) by which they mean open provocation, but a few provinces are notorious for their active hostility. But again, the Pope himself suggests acting on a case-by-case basis.

There has to be a willingness to try, not outright dismissal that any workable integration could ever be possible.]

Cardinal Zen also noted, “The Holy Father today is very clear in his ideas regarding the Church in China, and we are lucky to have such a Pope.” [One of the things he seems clear about in the 2007 Letter is that it is possible to work out unity on a case-by-case basis - i.e., you cannot wait for an ideal situation before attempting unity on the local level. Why does Cardinal Zen ignore that?]

As we completed our discussion we recalled again the words of Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. We reflected on how China’s history of Catholic persecution continues to inspire Chinese Catholics toward deeper commitment to their faith.

Cardinal Zen ended with a prayer to Our Lady, Help of Christians, “to bless all those who are suffering for their faith, and also the people who are trying to help them.” [What about praying for the Chinese who have chosen the way of compromise - be it simply bureaucratic - and who are able to practice their faith openly? I wish Dr. Clark had asked Cardinal Zen about the example of Shanghai, because it seems to be so obvious! And what about all the local churches Dr. Clark himself has visited in China where local Catholics who practice their faith openly appear fairly untroubled?]

As we stood to leave, Cardinal Zen said, “Well, I need to rush off so I can offer my daily Mass.” He blessed for us a number of images of Our Lady of China, and left the room.

Zen is a man of the Church, profoundly concerned for the faith and freedom of his fellow Chinese. And it is clear that he will not rest until the Communist government of China gives the Church complete independence from its control. As Zen said, “The final word should not be exclusively on the side of an atheistic government.” [No, but they will continue to have the last works unless something as phenomenal as the fall of the Berlin Wall or a complete generational change in Chinese leadership takes place to change the paradigm!]

It appears that Cardinal Zen intends to get little respite in his retirement years, for he has set himself to no less a task than contending with a government that he describes as “cruel and pitiless.”

Despite China’s struggles, Zen is a man of hope; as he has said, “Winter has passed and spring will come.”


While I admire Cardinal Zen for his zeal and determination, from the practical aspect. his hard line cannot make it any easier for the underground Catholics he is solicitous about on the mainland.

Also, the Communists - who own HongKong - have given him a pass all these years despite his militancy, leading annual demonstrations against the regime for its various violations of democratic rights. Whatever their reasons, that is a 'plus' mark so far for them.

BTW, Catholic World Report would have done better by running both the Jin and Zen interviews done by Clark, instead of just Cardinal Zen's, because together they give two sides of the picture.]


AsiaNews today published an article by Cardinal Zen
www.asianews.it/news-en/Card.-Zen:-not-true-that-“Beijing-really-wants-Bishops-appointed-by-the-Pope”-19...
in which he rebuts a recent 30 GIORNI article claiming to see a hopeful signal in the fact that the Vatican and Beijing have agreed on many recent episcopal nominations.

Sandro Magister and AsiaNews editor Fr. Bernardo Cervellera were just as dismissive in recent articles about the significance of the agreements on new bishops. I don't think anyone in the Vatican, much less Benedict XVI himself, is reading too much into it, as welcome as it is, and even if 30 GIORNI does (which does not speak for the Vatican), but surely, the Vatican is not disdainful of it either! Here are the links to Magister and Cervellera:
>Seven new bishops do not a summer make
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1344197?eng=y
>The mirage and religious freedom for the official and underground church
www.asianews.it/news-en/China-Holy-See:-the-mirage-and-religious-freedom-for-the-official-and-underground-church-19...

The only reason I am not posting them is that I have no time just now to review their English translations. They are both excellent news sources, but I always have problems with their English translations, especially since their originals in Italian are available.

An Anglican priest shared this open letter through his bolg, simply called Holy Trinity Reading, identifying his church and parish.


15 Anglo-Catholic bishops write
their clergy to uphold opposition
to women and gay bishops - but also
point to Roman Catholic alternative
by Fr. David Elliott
Priest-in-Charge
Church of the Trinity (Anglican)
Reading, England
July 31, 2010


Fifteen bishops have written to Church of England clergy voicing their concerns over the crisis in the Church of England.

The letter is signed by serving bishops but does not include evangelical bishops such as Wallace Benn and Michael Nazir-Ali, or retired bishops like Edwin Barnes, John Gaisford, James Johnson, or David Silk. There are at least two other diocesan bishops who would agree with the contents.

As the letter may be shared with the laity here it is in full:

---

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

'God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you, but I will tell you the good and proper way.' (1 Samuel 12:23)

These are grave times in the Church of England especially for those of us unable in good conscience to accept that any particular church has the authority to admit women to the episcopate. While we certainly accept the good faith of those who wish to make this change believing it to be God's will, we cannot rejoice with them, not least because of the disastrous cost to Catholic unity. [Intersting that they refer to themselves as Catholics in the Church of England itself! I did not know that before.]

Our concerns are not only about sacramental assurance though that is of profound importance. If the legislation now proposed passes, it will not provide room for our tradition to grow and flourish. We will be dependent on a Code of Practice yet to be written, and sadly our experience of the last almost twenty years must make us wonder whether even such an inadequate provision will be honoured in the long term.

Neither the Report of the Revision Committee nor the legislation itself shows a proper understanding of our reservations, however carefully these have been presented through the consultation process and in the College and House of bishops.

It remains a deep disappointment to us that the Church at large did not engage with the excellent Rochester Report and paid scant attention to the Consecrated Women report sponsored by Forward in Faith.

We must now accept that a majority of the members of the Church of England believe it is right to proceed with the ordination of women as bishops, and that a significant percentage of those in authority will not encourage or embrace with enthusiasm the traditional integrity or vocations within it.

Nor is it their intention or desire to create a structure which genuinely allows the possibility of a flourishing mission beyond this generation.

However, the closeness of the vote on the Archbishops' amendment for co ordinate jurisdiction, concerns though there are about its adequacy, suggest at least a measure of disquiet in the majority about proceeding without a provision acceptable to traditionalists.

The Catholic group [Again!] fought valiantly on the floor of the synod and we are grateful for that, and while many in the Church and press are speaking as if the legislation is now passed, final synodical approval is still some way off.

Whatever happens in the Synod, there are some Anglo Catholics, including in our own number, who are already looking at, indeed are resolved to join the Ordinariate as the place where they can find a home in which to live and proclaim their Christian faith, in communion with the Holy Father, yet retaining something of the blessings they have known and experienced in the Anglican tradition.

Of course the Ordinariate is a new thing, and not all of us are trailblazers or can imagine what it might be like. Some will undoubtedly want to wait and see how that initiative develops before making a decision. Yet others will make their individual submission and find their future as Roman Catholics.

Were the present proposals not to be substantially amended or defeated, many more of us will need to consider seriously these options.

A number will remain, perhaps even reluctantly because of personal circumstances, family loyalties, even financial necessity, but with a deep sense of unease about the long term future, an unease that is surely well founded.

There are faithful Catholic clergy and lay people, though deeply opposed to the likely Synodical decision who cannot currently imagine themselves being anywhere else but within the Church of England.

They wonder how they can stay, yet cannot imagine leaving their much loved church and parish. They do not want to be forced out of the Church they love and will persevere where they are, whatever the theological or ecclesiological ambiguities, and seek God's blessing on all they do.

Those who are not actively seeking a home elsewhere must work to defeat the currently proposed legislation. It is essential that traditionalists engage in the debate and discussion in their diocese and are active in the election process for the next quinquennium of the General Synod when the two thirds majority in each House will be required if the legislation is to pass. Whatever our individual futures, and however disheartened we might feel, the Church of England needs strong Catholic hearts and voices.

The text quoted at the beginning of this letter was the one used by John Keble in his famous Assize sermon, often regarded as the starting point of the Oxford Movement. It seems remarkably apposite, and gives a clue to an appropriate attitude of heart for this process: prayerful and gracious, but clear. [What an irony - or is it a harbinger - that the leader of the Oxford Movement ended up being the most celebrated Anglican convert o Catholicism and will be beatified soon!]

We are all bishops united in our belief that the Church of England is mistaken in its actions. However, we must be honest and say we are not united as to how we should respond to these developments.

Nevertheless we are clear that each of the possibilities we have outlined has its own integrity and is to be honoured. We are resolved to respect the decisions made by laity, bishops, priests and deacons of our integrity, and call on you to do the same.

It would be a sad and destructive thing indeed if we allowed our happiness and wondering to drift into unguarded or uncharitable criticism of those who in good conscience take a different path from our own. We must assume the best motives in one another, and where there are partings let them be with tears and the best wishes of Godspeed.

You will we hope know of the meetings in both provinces to take place in late September when there will be opportunities for discussion and an exchange of views about the future.

Be assured of our prayers as you reflect about how best to respond to the challenges which face us, and we ask your prayers for us too as we seek to be faithful to the Lord, and to the Faith once delivered.

Please share the contents of this letter with your people, and indeed with any who might be interested to know of it.

The Rt Revd John Hind, Bishop of Chichester
The Rt Revd Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Europe
The Rt Revd Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn
The Rt Revd Martyn Jarrett, Bishop of Beverley
The Rt Revd John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham
The Rt Revd Peter Wheatley, Bishop of Edmonton
The Rt Revd John Goddard, Bishop of Burnley
The Rt Revd Andrew Burnham, Bishop of Ebbsfleet
The Rt Revd Keith Newton, Bishop of Richborough
The Rt Revd Tony Robinson, Bishop of Pontefract
The Rt Revd John Ford, Bishop of Plymouth
The Rt Revd Mark Sowerby, Bishop of Horsham
The Rt Revd Martin Warner, Bishop of Whitby
The Rt Revd Robert Ladds
The Rt Revd Lindsay Urwin OGS

---

I must confess I felt a shudder down my spine and my stomach churned into overdrive when I first saw the headings on this article - and it got worse after I read it, despite admonishing myself to stay calm. I certainly hope my gut has it all wrong this time, and that a flaming liberal has not just infiltrated into Papa Ratzinger's Curia in the robes of St. Alphonsus Liguori's order!


New Vatican appointee 'extremely positive'
on US nuns: Mons. Tobin says his appointment
suggests 'how badly the visitation
of US women religious has gone down'
By John L Allen Jr


VATICAN CITY - Saying he hopes to offer the Vatican a "different picture" of women religious in the United States, Rome's new number two official for religious life says he suspects the choice of an American for that job, and one known to be sympathetic to women religious, may reflect awareness of "just how badly" a controversial Vatican investigation of women's orders has been received. [Not by all the female orders, only by the liberal nuns who are offended that the Vatican should do this at all! As if the Vatican had absolutely no right to supervise what they do when they so obviously think of themselves as a counter-Magisterium, defying the Pope at will!]

Fr. Joseph Tobin spoke with NCR Aug. 3, one day after his appointment by Pope Benedict XVI as the new Secretary of the Vatican's Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, colloquially known as the "Congregation for Religious." It oversees affairs involving some 190,000 religious priests and brothers, and roughly 750,000 sisters, worldwide.

Tobin, 58, is a native of Detroit who served from 1997 to 2009 as Superior General of the Redemptorist order in Rome. He had been at Oxford University in England on sabbatical prior to his Vatican appointment. He will be ordained an archbishop when he takes up the post.

Traditionally, the secretary of a Vatican congregation is the official who coordinates its day-to-day work, while the cardinal-prefect provides broad overall direction. Tobin's role is likely to be all the more important in the Congregation for Religious given that its current prefect, Slovenian Cardinal Franc Rodé, is already past the usual retirement age of 75 and is widely expected to be replaced soon.

Speaking on background, Vatican sources told NCR in early August that one reason Tobin was appointed was to ensure that someone with a strong background in religious life is already in place when that transition occurs.

Though Tobin will have broad responsibility for matters involving religious life all over the world, one hot-button challenge he inherits right away is the Apostolic Visitation of women's religious orders in the United States. Some American sisters have taken the investigation as a vote of "no confidence" from the church's male-dominated power structure. [UGHHHH! Typical knee-jerk female-chauvinist paranoia! This has nothing to with gender at all, but about obedience and discipline. Even Mary mMagdalene, whom they would probably invoke as their putative but totally fanciful source of 'apostolic succession' for women in their relentless mythbuilding!]

"There's a great deal of misunderstanding among American religious about the decisions of the Holy See, and in particular the visitation of women religious," Tobin said.

"Maybe I can offer a different picture of American women religious than the one that sometimes has been presented in Rome," Tobin said. "My own impression is extremely positive." [Really now? One must find out what company he kept among the nuns. Has he never really met anyone who has been openly contemptuous and defiant of the Pope, which would be clear to anyone who reads the magazine John Allen writes foR? Did he find it 'positive' when some nuns marched ostentatiously in Washington to support a healthcare bill that would allow the use of public funds to support abortions? How come Allen did not ask Tobin a single challenging question????

At present, the visitation is in what organizers refer to as "phase three," meaning a series of on-site visits to women's orders in America. It follows phase one, constituted by personal exchanges between Sacred Heart of Jesus Sr. Mary Clare Millea, the coordinator of the visitation, and the superiors of women's orders, and phase two, formed by written responses to questionnaires mailed to every congregation in the country.

The fourth and final phase will consist of preparing detailed reports on all 420 "units" of women's religious life in America, meaning orders as well as their individual provinces, to be sent to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life during 2011.

In terms of what Rome eventually does with that input, Tobin said he hopes to bring a fresh perspective. [Will he begin by telling the liberal nuns that it is their duty to cooperate with the visitation and there is nothing to be defensive about? In fact, they should consider it their chance to tell the Vatican frankly and objectively why they say the things they say, without hysterics or hyperbole!]

"I feel I can bring something to that, because I've worked all my life with women's religious," Tobin said. "They taught me when I was a kid, and my mother's family was very close to the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters. I've preached women's retreats and listened a lot to them over the years." [But that's assuming that all nuns today are 'equal'! Not since Vatican II, they haven't been! Inflamed by delusions of self-conferred authority encouraged by the Vatican II progressivists, liberal nuns have turned into a distasteful tribe of arrogant harpies who think each one of them is every bit as authoritative as the Pope, and who have lost all notion of obedience and discipline.]

Tobin speculated that perhaps the choice of an American for the secretary's role in the Congregation for Religious could "suggest some awareness of just how badly this thing [the visitation] has gone down." [In itself, a statement of bias on his part! One would think he has not been reading the magazine Allen writes for, where half the headlines on any given day blares forth the latest condemnation of the Pope and the Vatican from types like the Chittister harpy? How can any right-thinking person consider any of that right or proper at all?]

This week, Tobin is in Long Beach, Calif., for a meeting of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, the umbrella group in the United States for men's religious orders. Officers from the companion body for women, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, will also be attending, and Tobin said he intends to meet with them.

"I want to have a frank discussion, to help me shape my thinking and whatever proposals I might bring to the congregation," he said.

Tobin said his main aim will be to find a way to "bring life" out of the Apostolic Visitation, meaning to convert it into a positive experience. [Good luck with that! As though these self-styled 'we know best' types would ever consider anything initiated by the Vatican to be positive! At least he is not thinking of asking the Vatican to shut down the process!]

Leaders in women's religious life seem bullish about the Tobin appointment. [But will they be just as bullish if it turns out, God willing, that he tells them they must cooperate with the proces and not refuse to answer questionnaires or be openly hostile to the visitators?]

"Fr. Joe Tobin is held in high regard by U.S. men and women religious," said an Aug. 3 statement from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

"He brings a breadth of knowledge of matters impacting religious life and has a wide range of experience and expertise. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious looks forward to working with him in his new position."

Tobin said he anticipates being back in Rome to take up his new post sometime in early September.

Since we have no separate thread for cultural news in general, I am posting this here, on the pretext that the Muslims are inaugurating this clock on the first day of Ramadan today.


The new clock tops a new hotel mega-complex overlooking the Kaaba, Islam's holiest place [giant black cube in the center of the square]. It antedates Islam and is believed to mark the site of the first house ever built by Adam, over which subsequently, Abraham rebuilt. Muslims face east towards the Kaaba during their five-times-a-day prayers and in their mosques. It is also the object of the hajj, the pilgrimage that is near-obligatory for all Muslims who can afford the trip.

Muslims have world's tallest clock
in world's 2nd tallest building!

MECCA, August 12 - If all goes well, the world's newest, largest clock should start ticking off its first seconds today in the city of Mecca. Its tower also happens to be Saudi Arabia's tallest building, and the tower's complex is the largest hotel in the world. Talk about going for broke!

At 151 feet in diameter, the four clock faces on the Mecca Royal Clock Hotel Tower is just about as wide as an American 160-foot-wide football field, and absolutely dwarfs the world's most famous tower clock faces, Big Ben's 23-footers. It also takes advantage of modern technology, as its four faces will light up the sky with two million LEDs.

The rest of the building is no slouch, either. The Royal Clock Hotel's clock tower is just shy of 2,000 feet tall (Big Ben, by comparison, stands 316 feet tall), and, when it's completed sometime in Autumn next year, it'll be the second tallest skyscraper in the world after Dubai's Burj Khalifa.

An earlier report:

Not just supplanting London's Big Ben,
but will Mecca time also replace GMT?

Saudi Arabia is hoping that the debut of what is said to be the world's largest clock in Islam's holiest city of Mecca will help establish the city as an alternative time standard to the Greenwich meridian.

The new four-faced clock, which looms over Mecca's Grand Mosque and is perched atop what is expected to be the world's second tallest building when completed, is to enter a three-month trial period this week -- the first week of the holy month of Ramadan.

Situated in the heart of the massive Abraj al-Bait complex -- comprising hotels, shopping malls and conference centers -- the clock will run on Arabia Standard Time, three hours ahead of the Universal Time standard.

Each of the clock's four faces are 151 feet in diameter and will be illuminated by 2 million LED lights, along with huge Arabic script reading: "In the Name of Allah." Another 21,000 white and green colored lights, fitted at the top of the clock, will flash to as far as 19 miles to signal Islam's five-times daily prayers.

The clock reflects a goal to replace the 126-year-old Universal Time standard, also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is seen as "colonial" by some Muslims.

"Putting Mecca time in the face of GMT -- this is the goal," Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, told The Telegraph.

With the global population of Muslims growing at a rapid rate, the building project is part of the Saudi government's plan to enable Mecca to accommodate as many as 10 million pilgrims each year. And for Mecca residents, the plan already seems to be successful.

"Before, we heard and saw famous clocks in the West," Ahmed Harleem, an Egyptian living in Mecca, told AFP. "But today, we can as Muslims be proud of this giant project ... it means an honor for a place, and time for me."

Babel comes to mind.. and this is another reason to find an alternative energy source to fossil fuel, ASAP!

A comical thing would be a direct hit by a bolt of lightning along with a booming voice: "I smite thee!!!"

Ahem... with no human injuries involved, of course.

Turkey allows Dormition liturgy
in historic monastery turned museum
Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I will celebrate
and thousands will come from Greece and Russia




ROME, August 13, 2010 – The news was announced last June by the agency Fides of the Vatican's Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

On August 15, which for the Orthodox is the feast of the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God, the Turkish government has authorized the celebration of liturgy in a place that is a symbol of the Christian faith of the East - as much of its flourishing as of its violent uprooting: the monastery of Sumela or (its Greek name) of the Mother of God of the Black Mountain.

The concession was greeted with surprise by the Orthodox community, not only in Turkey, where the Greek-Byzantines of the Patriarchate of Constantinople have been reduced to a few thousand, but also abroad, especially in Greece and Russia.

Nonetheless, it's a concession limited to only a few hours. The liturgy will be allowed to be celebrated only once, outside of the monastery, in front of the ruins.



The monastery of Sumela, in fact, after withstanding the storms of history for fifteen centuries and staying alive even during Ottoman rule, was emptied and reduced to ruins in 1923, with the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox by the modern Turkish state.



Since then, it has been forbidden to celebrate the liturgy there. The monastery, a small portion of which has been restored, has become a destination for tourist excursions from nearby Trabzon, the city on the Black Sea where on February 5, 2006, a young Muslim killed the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro.

For August 19, the Turkish government has made a similar concession for the Armenians. It has authorized the celebration of a liturgy in the Church of the Holy Cross in Akhtamar, on an island of Lake Van.

This church, which had also fallen into ruin, was renovated in 2007. But it was set up as a museum, and until now, liturgy has not been permitted to be celebrated there.

When the Armenian Patriarch asked for permission to place a cross on top of the renovated church, the Turkish authorities refused. The church had to remain without a cross, without bells, without sacred markings, without pastors, and without faithful.

Instead, the ceremony for the conclusion of the renovations prominently featured images of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.

The liturgies at Sumela and Akhtamar on August 15 and 19 will be attended by a few thousand faithful, many of them from abroad: an unusual number for Turkey, a cradle of the early Christianity propagated by Paul, and for centuries, a land of flourishing Christianity, but where today the churches – or the few of them that remain – don't even have legal recognition.

Moreover, last August 5, two churches dating back to the fourth and sixth centuries in the village of Yemisli in the region of Mardin in southeastern Anatolia were reopened for worship. The buildings were renovated by seventy-two families of the Syriac Orthodox community, which numbers about 5,000 faithful in Turkey.

The concessions made this August by the government of Ankara are being interpreted as a move on the chessboard of Turkey's problematic entry into the European Union, which is impossible without minimal standards concerning religious freedom.

But these and other appearances of openness continue to be accompanied by massive and persistent constraint. One of the reasons why the Turkish authorities oppose religious freedom is the fear that an increase in places of worship would bring out into the open the many secret Christians, registered as Muslims, believed to be living in the country.

On the two imminent celebrations, and in particular, on the history and symbolic significance of the monastery of Sumela, here is what was written for the August 1 issue of "L'Osservatore Romano" by a highly informed expert on the subject, Franciscan Fr. Egidio Picucci.

_____________



A celebration at
'Monte Cassino of the East'
by Egidio Picucci
Translated from


The month of August will be remembered in Turkey for two extraordinary religious events: on the 15th, after 87 years, the "divine Eucharist" will be celebrated in the former monastery of Sumela, on the outskirts of Trabzon, ancient Trebizond, abandoned by the monks in 1923; and on the 19th, another will be celebrated in the Armenian church of the Holy Cross in Akhtamar, built on an island in the splendid Lake Van, in the eastern part of the country.

The Turkish government has granted the authorization - greeted with surprise and satisfaction by the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, which is organizing itself so that everything will go smoothly, seeing that about 10,000 Greek and Russian Orthodox are expected, with the attendance of a few politicians from these two countries.

Greek television will broadcast the entire celebration live, so that in particular, the descendants of the Greeks who had to leave the Pontus during the Turkish occupation will at least be able to see the places where their ancestors lived and come to know one of the most significant places for Eastern Orthodoxy.

In fact, Sumela is known as the Monte Cassino of the East, because for fifteen centuries, from 385 to 1923, it was the monastery-guide for the safeguarding of Greek tradition, art, history, and culture, and of religion all over the territory of the Pontus, whose inhabitants heard their own language being spoken by the apostles in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost.

The monastery is located fifty kilometers from Trabzon, among the gorges of the Altindere (Torrent of Gold), at an elevation of 1,200 meters, spanning forty meters of a long rocky outcrop of Mount Zigana, at the precipice of a deep ravine.

According to tradition, it was the Virgin herself who showed the place to the Athenian monks Barnabas and Sophronios, who, coming from the Chalkidiki peninsula, turned the smaller caves of the mountain into cells, and the largest one into a church, displaying there the most artistic of the three icons venerated at that time in Athens and attributed to Saint Luke.


Clockwise, from upper left: the icon venerated in Sumela; the monastery's famous 'rock church'; and frescoes in the rock church.

The fame of the mountain shrine and of the sanctity of the two monks, who died in 412 (on the same day, tradition assures us), drew pilgrims, obtained donations, and above all summoned other monks, becoming the leading center of culture and pilgrimage in all of northeast Asia Minor.

Even the emperor Justinian mingled among the humble people who braved the nearly inaccessible mountain, on the way back from one of his campaigns against the Persians, leaving a silver urn to house the relics of Saint Barnabas and the text of the four Gospels written on gazelle skin.

In spite of everything, the monastery was an easy target for bandits, who did not spare even the monastery, pillaged and burned in 640, but rebuilt four years later by Christophoros of Vazelon, a courageous monk who restored the morale of his fellow monks and fortified the construction so ingeniously that Athanasios of Trebizond reproduced it in building the Great Lavra of Mount Athos.

Experience, nonetheless, taught the monks that in order to protect themselves they needed stronger, military-style fortifications, so they made the monastery an almost inaccessible perch, turning it into an oasis of peace in the midst of a growing turmoil of wars and struggles, allowing it to reach its greatest splendor at the time of the empire of the Komnenos family, the rulers of nearby Trebizond.

In 1350, Alexios III asked to be crowned emperor there, and left a "chrysobull," or golden seal, there. With him, the monastery became a masterpiece of Byzantine art. Manuel III was also crowned there, leaving as a gift a relic of the cross, which was placed in the treasury; a great relic in a great reliquary.

The monastery's activity was not even interrupted by the Turkish conquest in 1461. On the contrary, Mehmed II Fatih ("the Conqueror") paid a very respectful visit there, leaving a "firman," an imperial decree, guaranteeing the monks ownership of the surrounding land.

Selim I also held it in high esteem, staying there during a hunting expedition and later sending five huge spiral candlesticks, as tall as himself, encrusted with jewels and gold inscriptions. He returned there on the eve of the war against Ismail of Tabriz, and a third time after his victory, to deliver two massive golden candelabra taken from his enemy.

Gifts and privileges came from other sultans and from various patriarchs, sign of a devotion that placed the "Panàgia tu Mèlas," the All-Holy of the Black Mountain (the name Sumela seems to be derived from a corruption of "tu Mèlas") above even the shrine of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, the glory of the city nestled on the coast of the Black Sea.

The life of Sumela seemed imperishable: faith, art, technology – it is said that an ingenious communication system permitted messages to be sent between the monastery and Trebizond in just ten minutes – and culture had made it the soul of the Pontus, a cardinal point of the spirit for pilgrims, scholars, and artists; the monks had turned it into a balcony wide open to heaven, and not just a way station in the countryside. Its reddish doors seemed to be painted with the blood that saved from death.

But in the winter between 1915 and 1916, the dream was shattered for the first time in fifteen centuries: the war forced the monks to leave mountain and monastery. They returned after the Russian occupation, and again following the armistice of 1918. It was a parenthesis of five years, because the Greco-Turkish war of 1923 drove them away forever, while unknown hands tried to obliterate Sumela with fire.

The memory of the monastery lived on in time thanks to European scholars who sifted among the ruins, bringing to light the remains of frescoes of surprising freshness and of intense spirituality. The monk Ambrosios saved the most precious relics walled up in the church of Saint Barbara: the icon of the Virgin was taken to the monastery of Dovràs, near Veria, in Greece, and the manuscript of the Gospels went to the Byzantine museum of Athens.

Today, not a few enthusiasts confront the mountain to visit the ancient relic amid the vegetation, so surprisingly attached to the mountain that it seems suspended between heaven and earth.

Even if the remains of a few heavy windows seem like the eyelids of death, behind them flutter recollections of life. The library, the remains of the church of the Dormition, the refectory, the 72 cells for the monks distributed over four floors, the lookout spot on the fifth floor, pulse with memories and are a genuine balcony over the infinite, cradled by the waters of the Altindere, snaking through rocky ravines.

Led by Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, the Orthodox will therefore experience at Meryemana Monastiri, the present Turkish name for Sumela, moments of profound emotion, proud that such ancient vestiges of faith have withstood the fury of time and of men.

Orthodox images of the Dormition of Mary:




Travel notes:

The 1000-year-old Monastery of the Virgin Mary at Sumela is among the most impressive sights of Turkey's Black Sea coast.

The monastery's alpine setting, clinging to a sheer rock cliff in the midst of evergreen forests loud with the splash of chill mountain streams, comes as a surprise for those who think of Turkey as a land of rolling steppe. The land around the monastery is now preserved as Altindere National Park.

It's a 1-km (6/10 mile), 35 to 45-minute hike uphill from the parking lot to the monastery entrance. You rise 250 meters (820 feet) in the climb.

The excursion to Sumela is best done as a half-day excursion from Trabzon, 46 km (29 miles) away.

On the Feast of the Assumption:
Thousands of pilgrims evacuated
after bomb threat at Lourdes‎
By Peter Allen

August 16, 2010

Thousands of pilgrims, including the sick and handicapped, were evacuated from the shrine of Lourdes yesterday during a bomb scare.

Police received a warning that four devices were about to go off among some 30,000 worshippers, priests and nuns congregating for midday Mass.

Army bomb disposal experts and sniffer dogs spent three hours searching the grotto in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in south-west France, but nothing was found.

‘It was a cruel hoax,’ said a police spokesman. ‘Somebody wanted to cause as much disruption as possible to people already suffering illness and handicaps.’

Pierre Adias, spokesman for Lourdes, said: ‘We have no idea who is behind this. Bomb scares are not something you associate with Lourdes.’

The two main Masses of the morning were over when the evacuation began. The police spokesman added: ‘There was some panic, but people soon started to leave in an orderly fashion. Priority was given to those in wheelchairs.’

Most of the pilgrims were gathered around the Lourdes grotto where, 152 years ago, the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in front of 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous.

About 200 million have visited since 1860, and the Roman Catholic church has recognised 67 miracle healings, the last in November 2005.

Despite this, Lourdes has built up enemies among those who criticise ts commercialism. It makes millions a year from tourism and the sale of souvenirs.

Others, including members of the Catholic Church, are deeply sceptical of its alleged healing powers, attributing them to superstition. Those hit by the Lourdes hoax were celebrating the feast of the Assumption, when Mary was said to have risen up to Heaven.

It is a particularly important day in the Lourdes calender, ensuring lots of extra visitors.

Reflected glory:
The Raphael tapestries
and their cartoons
By Jan Dalley

August 20, 2010

London, April
In the Victoria and Albert Museum, the cool old-fashioned gallery that contains the Raphael Cartoons is an oasis of hush. There are four other people in the high-ceilinged room; all, like me, on their own. Around the walls the seven luminous paintings of the lives of the saints Peter and Paul, vivid scenes alive with muscular figures, have the gentle glow of watercolour.

After a bit one’s eye acclimatises and the subdued beauty of these works begins to grow. Each is three metres high and five or six metres wide, their figures a little more than life size: we can walk into these scenes.

These “cartoons”, completed in 1515-16, were designs for seven of the 10 tapestries woven for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican; and next month, as Pope Benedict XVI makes his visit to England and Scotland, four of the Sistine tapestries will be sent from Rome to be displayed here, next to the paintings that are their templates, for the first time.

For the moment, though, my footsteps echo in the room. From the gallery next door, there are bursts of excited chatter from the eager crowd visiting an exhibition of Grace Kelly’s dresses. They are looking at an actress’s frocks; we are looking at great serene tableaux that for several centuries have been considered some of the greatest works of the High Renaissance.

It’s a postmodern sort of juxtaposition, perhaps, but Raphael himself would have understood about visual fashion and its changing currents. He was a pragmatic artist. He had arrived in Rome as a 25-year-old in 1508, and when he painted these “Lives of the Saints” to the commission of Pope Leo X in 1513-16 he was making religious work in a very worldly context, and in an atmosphere of fierce competition.

Michelangelo had finished his magnificent ceiling for the Sistine Chapel only three years earlier, commissioned by Julius II, and Raphael had his chance to measure up to his rival.

Michelangelo loathed Raphael, who was eight years younger and already very successful; he had a highly productive studio employing 50 assistants, and had already carried out the great frescoes of the Papal apartments of the Vatican, including his masterpiece “The School of Athens”.

The rivalry between Pope Julius and his successor was as intense as that between the artists. When Julius died in 1513, it was the new Pope’s chance to make his mark as a patron, and he played to the fashions of the moment.

In the early 16th century tapestry was one of the most highly regarded art forms, so expensive to manufacture that it was the preserve of popes and princes and the richest nobles. The 10 Sistine tapestries were to be Leo’s monument, and Raphael’s creations did indeed cost almost five times as much as Michelangelo’s ceiling.

I gaze at a heron. The long legs of three waterbirds gleam through the reedy shallows in front of a boat where Jesus shows his disciples, earnest burly fishermen with gnarled hands “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes”, a homely vision in translucent blues and intense flesh tones.



Across the room, in “Healing of the Lame Man”, women breast-feed their pudgy babies under twisted classical columns; a great soft-eyed cow awaits its fate in “The Sacrifice at Lystra”. The three tapestries made from these cartoons will be travelling to London, together with “Christ’s Charge to Peter”, the representation of the biblical passage that forms the scriptural basis for the papacy.

Yet these dramatic scenes have a domestic quality that seems at odds with the pomp and circumstance of their original home, more fitted to this silent brown Victorian gallery than to the dazzling richness of the Vatican walls.

Rome, July
Along a hundred yards of pavement outside the Vatican, people are queuing four deep in the pounding summer heat. Inside, the press of bodies trudging doggedly past frescoes and statues, Madonnas and miracles, is like the London Underground at rush hour, and just about as edifying. There is no air conditioning.

The queues for the Sistine Chapel are held behind ropes in bunches at intervals along a great hallway, like the waves of runners at the start of a marathon. As we duck under a silky red rope and walk through, a woman in trainers shoots me a look of pure hatred.

In a large low-lit space where spotlights pick out Raphael’s peerless painting of the “Transfiguration of Christ”, the floor-to-ceiling glass vitrines around the walls are empty. The Raphael tapestries usually housed here are already gone – some to the restoration workshops, some in readiness for the event we have come to watch.

The Sistine Chapel
For the first time in 27 years, some of the tapestries are to be hung in the chapel for which they were made. It’s a rare occasion and even Vatican regulars are excited.

In 1983, to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s birth, these precious objects were brought from their museum cases and hung on the hooks that have been there for almost half a millennium: no one can remember the time before that.

In fact they were always intended to hang only on special occasions; when the finished tapestries were delivered to Rome from Brussels, from the master-weavers of Pieter van Aelst’s workshops, the first seven were put up in the Sistine Chapel in time for Christmas 1519.

Today is Wednesday and, in good Italian fashion – despite the eager hundreds still sweating at the gates – the Vatican is to close for the afternoon. The human floodtide ebbs like water draining from a sink, and one after another the mighty rooms are stilled and emptied, their cupids and caryatids writhing and cavorting to nobody.

Outside, in one of the Vatican courtyards, the shade of a café table umbrella hardly dims the lunchtime heat. Father Mark, sitting opposite me, takes a slim mobile from the pocket of his immaculate habit and purrs a few orders to distant gatekeepers. He is ridiculously handsome, a milk-fed blond from Ohio who looks like an unlikely extra in a Vatican-set thriller.

And this charm is put to good use: his role is to co-ordinate the Friends of the Vatican Museum, fundraising groups around the world whose donations help to maintain its treasures.

The English arm of the organisation, and notably its chief benefactor, hedge fund mogul Michael Hintze, is funding the tapestries’ loan to the V&A, as well as restoration work. As Father Mark sips his iced tea, I struggle to do a sum in my head: given that a single Raphael drawing sold for £29m earlier this year, what might the insurance estimate of four tapestries be? I give up.

Father Mark leads us on a brisk journey through high deserted corridors, past stripey-pantalooned Swiss guards. The Sistine Chapel is deserted, though brilliantly lit. The figures in Michelangelo’s great busy “Last Judgement” are still squirming and writhing and tumbling through clouds, while the huge serene ceiling glows overhead. Along the top tier of the walls run the brilliant frescoes by the early band of Tuscan masters who did their work just after the chapel was completed in 1480 – this must be the only place in the world where superb works by such as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio are almost sideshows.

Below them, along the second tier, run the frescoed “Stories of Moses” along one side, the “Stories of Christ” along the other. It’s the bottom tier of the three that holds the tapestries.

Up at the altar end of the chapel, beneath one of Michelangelo’s particularly vicious serpents, five hard-hatted workmen are assembling a scaffolding tower just as the first tapestry arrives, rolled up like an enormous carpet and marched in by six young women restorers, whose identical white lab coats and bright orange trainers make them look as if they are about to break into a dance routine.

Through the long afternoon, the light falls across the masterpieces around us. Slowly the tapestries and borders go up, the curators in a wincing agony of concern for their fragility. Four are to be hung today, not the whole set of 10: that would take too long, and some are not in good enough condition. They will be here for only a day: this evening the public will be allowed in to see them.

Part of the point of today’s exercise is to address a scholarly dispute about where each was originally designed to go: do the six scenes from the life of St Paul hang on the left wall beneath frescoes of the life of Moses, and the four of St Peter on the right-hand wall beneath Perugino’s scenes from the life of Christ? Or, as some scholars now contend, the other way round?

Were there originally plans for 16, not 10, in the set? The discussions rumble quietly on. What about the way the shadows fall? What about the fact that the chapel’s choir screen was moved? I’ve stopped listening: this is a moment for the eyes and the senses, not the brain.

And when an Italian camera crew arrives and turns off the chapel’s electric lights to adjust its own lighting, for almost the first time in living memory we can see the Sistine Chapel as it was intended to be: lit only by upward shafts from the high windows, every tier of its walls covered by almost impossible riches.

London, August
This time, there is only one other person in the V&A’s Raphael gallery. These gorgeous works now seem like old friends: much travelled, hardened survivors.

We have seven cartoons; no one knows what happened to the other three; but it is extraordinary that any of them made it down the centuries. Each was made up of hundreds of sheets of paper glued together and painted in distemper, and then cut into strips a metre wide to fit under the horizontal looms the Belgium masterworkers used.

They worked on the tapestry from the back, so that tapestry and cartoon are mirror images. Woven in wool, with highlights of silk and even gold and silver thread, reflecting in exquisite detail the colours, light and shade of the original, the work was highly skilled, more akin to embroidery than weaving.

Weavers even had their specialities: one was known for foliage, another for the feathers of the prancing water-birds, the most prestigious being those who could reproduce the subtleties of flesh.

More than one set of tapestries could be made from the cartoons, of course. A second set was made for François I of France (during the French Revolution it was melted down to recover the silver and gold in the thread), and a third in 1542 for Henry VIII of England (this perished in another conflagration, in Berlin in 1945). In 1623, more than a century after they left Raphael’s hands, the cartoons were still in strips when England’s King Charles I (then Prince of Wales) bought them and had a set of tapestries woven for himself at workshops in Mortlake, west of London.

Another civil war could easily have claimed these too, but when Oliver Cromwell took power in England in 1653, surprisingly he did not destroy or sell either the tapestries or the cartoons along with the rest of Charles I’s fine art collection.

The Puritan dictator seems to have appreciated these images from the home of the papacy: the muscular simplicity of the biblical scenes must have transcended doctrinal differences.

Apart from Charles’s tapestries, several sets made in Mortlake still exist in British collections, notably that of Scotland’s Duke of Buccleuch. But by the end of the 17th century the taste for tapestries was waning, and the cartoons came into their own as independent masterworks.

In 1690 the strips were reassembled and backed on canvas, as the artist had probably intended (although made to be reproduced in mirror-image, Raphael included tomb inscriptions with lettering the right way round – a giveaway).

Thanks to print-making, his designs were widely known to artists and art-lovers as icons of the High Renaissance, their cool classicism an antidote to over-excited Baroque.

The cartoons also achieved such fame for the simple reason that they were on public display. In 1699 William III commissioned Christopher Wren to build a gallery devoted to the Raphaels at Hampton Court that was open to the public; when Queen Victoria created the V&A, she decided in 1865 to make a special room for these treasures.

It seems to me that it is Raphael himself who is about to be brought back to us. He would never have seen his cartoons reunited with the tapestries woven from them – in fact, he probably never saw a full set of the tapestries at all, because he died just as they were completed, in 1520, at the age of only 37 – after, as Giorgio Vasari claims in his Lives of the Artists, a fever brought on by a night of riotous sex with his mistress.

Sorry I am a few days late posting this item...

The Church needs bishops
who are bold men of faith,
says Cardinal Ouellet
By Deborah Gyapong





QUEBEC CITY, August 18 (CCN)—In his new duties helping the Pope choose bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet will be looking for bold “men of faith” who have “the guts to help people live it out”

A bishop has to lead the community, so he needs a deep supernatural vision as well as the capacity to assess the political, cultural, and sociological context, said the new Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops in an interview.

Above all, a bishop must be “audacious in proposing the Word and in believing in the Power of the Word and the power of the Spirit.”

“We have to dare to speak to the deep heart, where the Spirit of the Lord is touching people beyond what we can calculate,” said Ouellet. “We need spiritual discernment and not just political calculation of the risk of the possibility of the message being received.”

Eight challenging years as Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada have forged Ouellet’s vision of the episcopacy. During that time he faced preaching the Good News in a culture that has fallen away from its Christian roots.

Being faithful to Catholic teaching meant opposition from Quebec’s deeply secularized, post-Catholic society. At the same time he had the challenge of making sure his priests were following him. “They are also in a situation of tension,” he said. “This is a difficult balance.”

Ouellet also stressed the importance of solidarity among bishops.

Earlier this year, Ouellet had spoken out against the lack of episcopal support for the Holy Father during the firestorm of media criticism for his handling of the sexual abuse crisis. Ouellet, too, has often stood alone inside a negative media maelstrom in Quebec.

But he recognized that in a large province like Quebec, each bishop has a different context. A rural diocese in a homogeneous part of the province faces different challenges from a big multicultural city like Montreal in how the Gospel message is conveyed, he said.

The need for unity and solidarity goes far beyond any political statements, he said, but involves a personal commitment that rises beyond a dogmatic faith to an “existential faith that means spiritual discernment of the presence of God and of God’s will.”

We are in a world where the Christian heritage is being strongly contested, so we have to recognize that and propose it better, though not through an attempt to restore the past, he said.

“We have to tell people about the Crucified and Risen Lord, who is shaping the Church today, with people faithful to His Word, to His Divine Presence and to the community he wants to see living of His Spirit.”

A bishop must always take a personal approach, he said. Bishops not only must state dogmatic positions, they must believe in them deeply, “then you have the power of conviction.”

“If you state it only formally and in the end you do not really want to see it applied because you don’t believe that it is possible that people accept it, you are in trouble for the transmission of the message,” he said.

Bishops must also be close to people, he said. Being spiritual does not mean keeping a distance.

“The Lord has given us his own heart to be a presence of His heart in the midst of the people,” the cardinal said. “So we have to be aware of that and cultivate what we call holiness, unity with Him, daily unity, in a way that is very human and very spiritual.”

He advocated an ascetical attitude in prayer to maintain purity of heart. “The love of the people is fulfilling the life of the priest.”

Ouellet takes on his key role in the Vatican at a time when the Church faces a worldwide sexual abuse crisis, especially in the west, fueled by a secularist news media.

Ouellet said he shared Pope Benedict XVI’s view that the focus on priests' sins during the Year for Priests gives the Church “an opportunity for purification.”

Reports that go back as far as 40 years have created a sense of panic that has distanced many people from the Church, he admitted. But Ouellet said sexual abuse is a worldwide problem well beyond the Church.

After the Church goes through her purification, the community of the faithful will help the rest of humanity to face this horrific problem, he said.

We have to solve the problem by virtue and prevention, not only by punishment and legal means, he said.

Ouellet came into Quebec eight years ago facing some suspicion as the “man from Rome” sent to set things straight.

He leaves Quebec beloved by many of the faithful, not only in Quebec but across Canada. At his final public celebration of the Eucharist before leaving for his new job, more than 2,000 people packed the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré to wish him farewell, sending waves of applause and gratitude and thronging him afterwards.

Already speculation is growing on who might replace him as Archbishop of Quebec. In the next two years, nine or ten bishops in that province reach retirement age.

“We have to have a rebirth of the Church in Quebec, and it will come,” Ouellet said.

“My prayer and my wish would be obviously that we have living communities with good priests, well-trained intellectually, spiritually, with a sense of deep commitment to Christ, of evangelical life for themselves and love for the people.”

Ouellet called for openness to new movements in the Church, and expressed hopes those already in Quebec, such as Famille Marie-Jeunesse, Catholic Christian Outreach, and the Eucharistic movement around the Youth Summit/Montee Jeunesse will “multiply.”

“I believe deeply there will be a new evangelization,” he said.

The Cardinal also called for a new intellectual dynamism, especially a reform of education to “recapture the spirit of Christianity and “create a new Christian culture.”

“We need intellectuals for that, theologians, philosophers, Christians who really believe in the Gospel and share the doctrine of the Church on moral questions,” he said.

“We have suffered from this mentality of dissent” that is “still dominating the intelligentsia.”

“There is no real discipleship there, real discipleship,” he said. “The discipleship that is emerging is from those who believe and who really love the Church.”

Another news item I sidelined in recent days is the following, because this was all pre-announced last April when the Vatican gave its approval to the third edition of the Novus Ordo Missal in a new English translation:


US to start using the Roman Missal
in its new English translation
at Advent next year
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien





WASHINGTON, August 20 (CNS) -- Catholics in the United States will begin using the long-awaited English translation of the Roman Missal on the first Sunday of Advent in 2011, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago said today/

The cardinal's announcement as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops marks the formal beginning of a more than 15-month period of education and training leading to the first use of the "third typical edition" of the Roman Missal at English-language Masses in the United States on Nov. 27, 2011.

The missal, announced by Pope John Paul II in 2000 and first published in Latin in 2002, has undergone a lengthy and rigorous translation process through the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), followed by sometimes heated discussions over particular wording at USCCB general assemblies during much of the past decade.

The USCCB said April 30 that the Vatican has given its "recognitio," or confirmation, of the new English translation of the missal, but final editing by Vatican officials was continuing at that time.

In a decree of proclamation sent to the U.S. bishops Aug. 20, Cardinal George said, "The use of the third edition of the Roman Missal enters into use in the dioceses of the United States of America as of the first Sunday of Advent, Nov. 27, 2011. From that date forward, no other edition of the Roman Missal may be used in the dioceses of the United States of America."

He added that the U.S. Catholic Church "can now move forward and continue with our important catechetical efforts as we prepare the text for publication."

Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., chairman of the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship, expressed gratitude about the final Vatican approval.

"I am happy that after years of preparation, we now have a text that, when introduced late next year, will enable the ongoing renewal of the celebration of the sacred liturgy in our parishes," he said.

The changes to be implemented in late 2011 include new responses by the people in about a dozen sections of the Mass, although changes in the words used by the celebrant are much more extensive.

At several points during the Mass, for example, when the celebrant says, "The Lord be with you," the people will respond, in a more faithful translation of the original Latin, "And with your spirit."

The current response, "And also with you," was "not meant as 'you too' or something like 'back at you,'" Father Richard Hilgartner, associate director of the USCCB Secretariat of Divine Worship, told Catholic News Service. Rather it is "an invocation to the priest as he celebrates the Mass, a reminder that he is not acting on his own, but in the person of Christ" -- a distinction that the new language will highlight, he said.

"The order and structure of the Mass will not change at all," he added, but Catholics will see some new texts for prayers, new observances for saints added to the church calendar in recent decades and such additions as a Mass in thanksgiving for the gift of human life and an extended vigil for Pentecost, similar to the Easter Vigil.

Since mid-April, Msgr. Anthony Sherman, director of the USCCB divine worship secretariat, and Father Hilgartner have been conducting workshops around the country for priests and diocesan leaders on implementation of the new missal. The workshops will continue into November.

Msgr. Sherman said participants often tell him that they had seen introducing the new missal as "an absolutely impossible task" before the workshop but said afterward, "I think I can actually do this," especially because of the wealth of resource materials that will be available to them.

The USCCB has prepared a parish implementation guide that includes a detailed timeline, bulletin inserts, suggestions for homilies and adult education classes on the liturgy and a wide variety of other resources. Audio, visual and print resources for priests, liturgical musicians and laypeople also are available now or in the works.

Sister Janet Baxendale, a Sister of Charity of New York who teaches liturgy at St. Joseph Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y., and its Institute of Religious Studies, is a consultant to the bishops' Committee on Divine Worship. She said the new translation has been needed for a long time.

When the Second Vatican Council endorsed a new missal and permitted Catholics around the world to begin celebrating Mass in their local languages, the translation work that followed "was at its best a rush job," she said. The Vatican's translation principles at the time also favored "a looser construction, with the thought that in this way it could be adapted to various people more readily," she added.

"As time went on, it became evident that ... in many instances, the richness and power of the Latin text didn't really come through," Sister Janet said. "This was true of all the translations, not just the English."

The new translation offers "more poetic texts, more beautiful texts," she said.

Father Hilgartner said Pope Benedict XVI has placed his own personal stamp on the liturgical changes by adding two new options for the dismissal prayer at the end of Mass, emphasizing the "connection between the Mass and living the Christian life."

In place of the current "The Mass is ended, go in peace," celebrants will be able to choose from four options, including the pope's suggestions -- "Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord" and "Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life."

There has been a lot of enthusiasm at the workshops for those added texts -- "an audible kind of 'oooh,'" Father Hilgartner said. "There's a reaction of some awe and enthusiasm for just these two phrases, and I think that's worth getting excited about."


I must confess that since I now attend traditional Mass regularly, I have not been too 'excited' over the new translation of the Novus Ordo, much as I appreciate that it has sought to be closer in sense and tone to the original Latin, in contrast to the rather pedestrian language that has marked the translati0n(s) used till now. I am old-fashioned even in preferring the elegant if archaic language of the King James Bible to the banality of the New American Bible, and while I am all for the most simple and direct way of privately praying to God, I cannot say enough for the need of public prayer in a language that is most 'worthy' of God, that has the power to uplift, and which allows the liturgy to be something other than routine and commonplace...