ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

MESSAGE TO MUSLIMS
FOR THE END OF RAMADAN

aUGUST 27, 2010


The Vatican today called on religious and civil authorities to stop inter-religious violence in a message to Muslims for the coming end of the Ramadan fasting month in early September.

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Christians and Muslims:
Together in overcoming violence
among followers of different religions


Dear Muslim Friends,

1. ‘Id Al-Fitr, which concludes Ramadan, presents, once again, a favorable occasion to convey to you the heartfelt wishes of serenity and joy on behalf of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue.

Throughout this month, you have committed yourselves to prayer, fasting, helping the neediest and strengthening relations of family and friendship. God will not fail to reward these efforts!

2. I am delighted to note that believers of other religions, especially Christians, are spiritually close to you during these days, as is testified by the various friendly meetings which often lead to exchanges of a religious nature. It is pleasing to me also to think that this Message could be a positive contribution to your reflections.

3. The theme proposed this year by the Pontifical Council, Christians and Muslims: Together in overcoming violence among followers of different religions, is, unfortunately, a pressing subject, at least in certain areas of the world.

The Joint Committee for Dialogue instituted by the Pontifical Council and al-Azhar Permanent Committee for Dialogue among the Monotheistic Religions had also chosen this topic as a subject of study, reflection and exchange during its last annual meeting (Cairo, 23 - February 24, 2010). Permit me to share with you some of the conclusions published at the end of this meeting.

4. There are many causes for violence among believers of different religious traditions, including:
- the manipulation of the religion for political or other ends;
- discrimination based on ethnicity or religious identity;
- divisions and social tensions.
Ignorance, poverty, underdevelopment are also direct or indirect sources of violence among as well as within religious communities.

May the civil and religious authorities offer their contributions in order to remedy so many situations for the sake of the common good of all society!

May the civil authorities safeguard the primacy of the law by ensuring true justice to put a stop to the authors and promoters of violence!

5. There are important recommendations also given in the above mentioned text:
- to open our hearts to mutual forgiveness and reconciliation, for a peaceful and fruitful coexistence;
- to recognize what we have in common and to respect differences, as a basis for a culture of dialogue;
- to recognize and respect the dignity and the rights of each human being without any bias related to ethnicity or religious affiliation;
- To promulgate just laws which guarantee the fundamental equality of all;
= to recall the importance of education towards respect, dialogue and fraternity in the various educational arenas: at home, in the school, in churches and mosques.

Thus we will be able to oppose violence among followers of different religions and promote peace and harmony among the various religious communities.

Teaching by religious leaders, as well as school books which present religions in an objective way, have, along with teaching in general, a decisive impact on the education and the formation of younger generations.

6. I hope that these considerations, as well as the responses which they elicit within your communities, and with your Christian friends, will contribute to the continuation of a dialogue, growing in respect and serenity, upon which I call the blessings of God!

Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran
President

Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata
Secretary

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The Blue Mosque in Istanbul expressing the wish, "Let us love, let us be loved", for the Feast of Eid-ul-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

The liturgical experts’ long tassels
by Fr. George Rutler
Pastor, Church of Our Savior, NYC

Aug 27, 2010


Under the avalanche of commentary on the new translation of the Ordinary Form of the Mass, just approved by the Vatican, I poke my head above the erudite criticisms, to speak as a man whose entire priesthood has been in parishes.

I am not a liturgist and, from the parochial perspective of a pastor who has studied worship much less than he has done it, I risk the tendency of many like me who probably unfairly think that liturgists are the ecclesiastical equivalent of lepidopterists.

A pastor is too busy leading people in worship to attend workshops on how to lead people in worship, and his duties in the confessional prevent him from attending seminars on how to hear confessions.

I do know that if I followed the guidelines of one liturgical commission, suggesting that I greet each penitent at the church doors with an open Gospel book and then lead a procession to a reconciliation room which looks more like an occasion of sin than a shrine for its absolution, the number of confessions in the middle of the metropolis where I serve would be severely reduced.

Publicly owned corporations are more accountable to their shareholders than tenured bureaucracies, which may explain why it took the Ford Motor Company only two years to cancel its Edsel, and not much longer for Coca Cola to restore its “classic” brand, while the Catholic Church has taken more than a generation of unstopped attrition to try to correct the mistakes of overheated liturgists.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius is now in its sunset repose and the bright young things who seem to be cropping up now all over the place with new information from Fortescue and Ratzinger, may either be the professional mourners for a lost civilization, or the sparks of a looming golden age.

One thing is certain to a pastor: the only parishioners fighting the old battles are old themselves, their felt banners frayed and their guitar strings broken, while a young battalion is rising, with no animus against the atrophied adolescence of their parents, and only eager to engage a real spiritual combat in a culture of death. They usually are ignorant, but bright, for ignorance is not stupidity.

They care little if the Liturgy is in Latin or English or Sanskrit, as long as they are told how to do it, for they were not told. Some critics of the new translations have warned that the changes are too radical, which is radioactively cynical from people who in the 1960’s wantonly dismantled old verities overnight, in their suburbanized version of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Our Lord warned enough about the experts of his day who loved long tassels, and who swore by the gold of the temple rather than the temple, to stay us from placing too much hope in ritual and texts to save lives.

Neglect of the aesthetics of worship is not remedied by the worship of aesthetics. A pastor will sometimes observe an over-reaction to the corruption of the Liturgy, so that ritual becomes theatre and Andrei Rubleyev yields to Aubrey Beardsley. Any group or religious community that is too deliberate about external form sows in itself the seeds of decadence.

Liturgy should be chantable, reverent, and expressive of the highest culture we know, without self-consciousness. Ars est celare artem. In tandem with Ovid, for whom it is art to conceal art, Evelyn Waugh said that Anthony Eden was not a gentleman because he dressed too well.

It is typical of some schismatic sects that the more they lapse into heresy, the more ritualistic they become. So one will see pictures of a woman claiming to be a bishop, vested like Pius X on his jubilee.

A genius of the Latin rite has been its virile precision, even bluntness. Contrast this with the unsettled grammar of “alternative opening prayers” in the original books from ICEL (the International Commission on English in the Liturgy), whose poesie sounds like Teilhard on steroids.

They were much wordier than the Latin collects or their English equivalents, and gave the impression of having been composed by fragile personalities who had not had a happy early home life. So too, the Prayers of the Faithful cloyingly pursued “themes” usually inspired by an undisciplined concern for air pollution and Third World debt.

I think there should be few options in the Liturgy, and no attempt to be “creative,” for that is God’s particular talent. As Vatican II taught in Sacrosanctum Concilium, "[T]here must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.” [Obviously never read - or more likely, willfully ignored - by the gung-ho liturgists of the bastardized versions of the Novus Ordo!]

Unfortunately, we have not yet resolved the problem of the simply bad Lectionary texts. While the Jerusalem Bible and Revised Standard Version are licit, only the Revised New American Bible is accessible for parish use. The Jerusalem Bible is a tool for study but was translated with a tin ear.

I grew up with the King James translation and thus am stunned when Job 38:17 (“Hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?”) is given as “Have you met the janitors of Shadowland?” So Sheol becomes a theme park.

But none of this matches the torture of the trans-gendered RNAB which manages to neuter every creature except Satan who remains male. Our Lord sometimes sounds like the Prince of Wales: “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world …?” and other times like a bored anthropologist: “Two people went up to the temple to pray….” But then the inevitable pronouns kick in and we find out that even after the liturgical gelding, these were men.

The Liturgy by grace changes lives. Any pastor who is blessed with an abundance of priestly vocations in his parish knows that they come in spite of epicene worship, demotic liturgy committees, and flailing song leaders. They simply join the chorus of the Greeks: "Sir, we would see Jesus."

I recall a prelate saying that even as a seminarian he hoped one day to be able to say Mass facing the people. It was a revealing statement, inasmuch as when he said Mass he seemed annoyed that the Lord was sometimes getting in the way.

While I am glad for the new and more accurate translation of the Mass, which is not perfection but closer to it than one deserves in an imperfect world, a far more important reform would be the return of the ad orientem position of the celebrant as normative. It is the antidote to the tendency of clerisy to impose itself on the people.

When a celebrant at Mass stops and says, “This is not about me,” you may be sure he thinks it may be about him. It would be harder for him to harbor that suspicion were he leading the people humbly to the east and the dawn of salvation.

John Henry Newman was the greatest master of English letters in his century of brilliant English, but he gave no countenance to his vernacular replacing the sacral tongue. That is another matter for another day.

But he knew the meaning of cupio dissolvi ['I crave dissolution'], and he taught that without such self-abnegation the gift of personality reduces the Passion to pantomime. It was because his priestcraft was also soulcraft, that he solemnly invoked the Sacred Heart at the altar in order to speak "heart to heart" with the people in the street:

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Clad in his sacerdotal vestments, [the priest] sinks what is individual in himself altogether, and is but the representative of Him from whom he derives his commission. His words, his tones, his actions, his presence, lose their personality; one bishop, one priest, is like another; they all chant the same notes, and observe the same genuflections, as they give one peace and one blessing, as they offer one and the same sacrifice.

The Mass must not be said without a Missal under the priest’s eye; nor in any language but that in which it has come down to us from the early hierarchs of the Western Church. But, when it is over, and the celebrant has resigned the vestments proper to it, then he resumes himself, and comes to us in the gifts and associations which attach to his person.

He knows his sheep, and they know him; and it is this direct bearing of the teacher on the taught, of his mind upon their minds, and the mutual sympathy which exists between them, which is his strength and influence when he addresses them. They hang upon his lips as they cannot hang upon the pages of his book.

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Father George W. Rutler is pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City and the author most recently of Clouds of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive. His The Spirit of Vatican II appeared in First Things and He is Not Here, his homily for the Mass for the repose of the soul of Richard John Neuhaus, and Words and Reality in “On the Square.”

I feel very lucky that I attend Fr. Rutler's church for the traditional Mass that he celebrates every Sunday morning. In place of his regular Pastor’s column in the weekly newsletter, starting Sunday, he is running istead excerpts from some of Cardinal Newman’s writings.

The Archbishop of Denver, along with the former Archbishop of St. Louis and now prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura, Mons Raymond Burke, have emerged as the most fearless voices of Catholic orthodoxy in the United States - each in his own way amplifying the basic messages that Benedict XVI has been articulating. Here is another Benedict-like discourse from Archbishop Chaput.

Catholics must resist secularization
and its intolerance of Christianity



August 24, 2010 (Spisske Podhradie, Slovakia) - Charles Chaput, Catholic Archbishop of Denver, Colorado, addressed the first session of the 15th symposium for the Canon Law Association of Slovakia on Tuesday. He called upon Catholics in America and in Europe, to resist the world's intolerance of Christianity.

Here is the full text:

Living within the truth:
Religious liberty and Catholic mission
in the new order of the world
by the Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Denver


Tertullian once famously said that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. History has proven that to be true. And Slovakia is the perfect place for us to revisit his words today.

Here, and throughout central and eastern Europe, Catholics suffered through 50 years of Nazi and Soviet murder regimes. So they know the real cost of Christian witness from bitter experience -- and also, unfortunately, the cost of cowardice, collaboration and self-delusion in the face of evil.

I want to begin by suggesting that many Catholics in the United States and Western Europe today simply don’t understand those costs. Nor do they seem to care. As a result, many are indifferent to the process in our countries that social scientists like to call “secularization” – but which, in practice, involves repudiating the Christian roots and soul of our civilization.

American Catholics have no experience of the systematic repression so familiar to your Churches. It’s true that anti-Catholic prejudice has always played a role in American life. This bigotry came first from my country’s dominant Protestant culture, and now from its “post-Christian” leadership classes. But this is quite different from deliberate persecution.

In general, Catholics have thrived in the United States. The reason is simple. America has always had a broadly Christian and religion-friendly moral foundation, and our public institutions were established as non-sectarian, not anti-religious.

At the heart of the American experience is an instinctive “biblical realism.” From our Protestant inheritance we have always – at least until now -- understood that sin is real, and men and women can be corrupted by power and prosperity.

Americans have often been tempted to see our nation as uniquely destined, or specially anointed by God. But in the habits of daily life, we have always known that the “city of God” is something very distinct from the “city of man.” And we are wary of confusing the two.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, wrote: “Despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot . . .” Therefore, “What is to be done with a people that is its own master, if it is not obedient to God?”1

America’s founders were a diverse group of practicing Christians and Enlightenment deists. But nearly all were friendly to religious faith. They believed a free people cannot remain free without religious faith and the virtues that it fosters.

They sought to keep Church and state separate and autonomous. But their motives were very different from the revolutionary agenda in Europe.

The American founders did not confuse the state with civil society. They had no desire for a radically secularized public life. They had no intent to lock religion away from public affairs. On the contrary, they wanted to guarantee citizens the freedom to live their faith publicly and vigorously, and to bring their religious convictions to bear on the building of a just society.

Obviously, we need to remember that other big differences do exist between the American and European experiences. Europe has suffered some of the worst wars and violent regimes in human history. The United States has not seen a war on its soil in 150 years. Americans have no experience of bombed-out cities or social collapse, and little experience of poverty, ideological politics or hunger.

As a result, the past has left many Europeans with a worldliness and a pessimism that seem very different from the optimism that marks American society. But these and other differences don’t change the fact that our paths into the future are now converging.

Today, in an era of global interconnection, the challenges that confront Catholics in America are much the same as in Europe: We face an aggressively secular political vision and a consumerist economic model that result – in practice, if not in explicit intent -- in a new kind of state-encouraged atheism.

To put it another way: The Enlightenment-derived worldview that gave rise to the great murder ideologies of the last century remains very much alive. Its language is softer, its intentions seem kinder, and its face is friendlier.

But its underlying impulse hasn’t changed -- i.e., the dream of building a society apart from God; a world where men and women might live wholly sufficient unto themselves, satisfying their needs and desires through their own ingenuity.

This vision presumes a frankly “post-Christian” world ruled by rationality, technology and good social engineering. Religion has a place in this worldview, but only as an individual lifestyle accessory. People are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not presume to intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on the workings of government, the economy, or culture.

Now, at first hearing, this might sound like a reasonable way to organize a modern society that includes a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural traditions, different philosophies of life and approaches to living.

But we’re immediately struck by two unpleasant details.

First, “freedom of worship” is not at all the same thing as “freedom of religion.” Religious freedom includes the right to preach, teach, assemble, organize, and to engage society and its issues publicly, both as individuals and joined together as communities of faith.

This is the classic understanding of a citizen’s right to the “free exercise” of his or her religion in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s also clearly implied in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contrast, freedom of worship is a much smaller and more restrictive idea.

Second, how does the rhetoric of enlightened, secular tolerance square with the actual experience of faithful Catholics in Europe and North America in recent years?

In the United States, a nation that is still 80 percent Christian with a high degree of religious practice, government agencies now increasingly seek to dictate how Church ministries should operate, and to force them into practices that would destroy their Catholic identity.

Efforts have been made to discourage or criminalize the expression of certain Catholic beliefs as “hate speech.” Our courts and legislatures now routinely take actions that undermine marriage and family life, and seek to scrub our public life of Christian symbolism and signs of influence.

In Europe, we see similar trends, although marked by a more open contempt for Christianity. Church leaders have been reviled in the media and even in the courts for simply expressing Catholic teaching.

Some years ago, as many of you may recall, one of the leading Catholic politicians of our generation, Rocco Buttiglione, was denied a leadership post in the European Union because of his Catholic beliefs [on homosexuality].

Earlier this summer we witnessed the kind of vindictive thuggery not seen on this continent since the days of Nazi and Soviet police methods: the Archbishop’s palace in Brussels raided by agents; bishops detained and interrogated for nine hours without due process; their private computers, cell phones, and files seized. Even the graves of the Church’s dead were violated in the raid.

For most Americans, this sort of calculated, public humiliation of religious leaders would be an outrage and an abuse of state power. And this is not because of the virtues or the sins of any specific religious leaders involved, since we all have a duty to obey just laws. Rather, it’s an outrage because the civil authority, by its harshness, shows contempt for the beliefs and the believers whom the leaders represent.

My point is this: These are not the actions of governments that see the Catholic Church as a valued partner in their plans for the 21st century. Quite the opposite. These events suggest an emerging, systematic discrimination against the Church that now seems inevitable.

Today’s secularizers have learned from the past. They are more adroit in their bigotry; more elegant in their public relations; more intelligent in their work to exclude the Church and individual believers from influencing the moral life of society.

Over the next several decades, Christianity will become a faith that can speak in the public square less and less freely. A society where faith is prevented from vigorous public expression is a society that has fashioned the state into an idol. And when the state becomes an idol, men and women become the sacrificial offering.

Cardinal Henri de Lubac once wrote that “It is not true … that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true, is that without God, [man] can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.” (2)

The West is now steadily moving in the direction of that new “inhuman humanism.” And if the Church is to respond faithfully, we need to draw upon the lessons that your Churches learned under totalitarianism.

A Catholicism of resistance must be based on trust in Christ’s words: “The truth will make you free.” (3) This trust gave you insight into the nature of totalitarian regimes. It helped you articulate new ways of discipleship.

Rereading the words of the Czech leader Václav Havel to prepare for this talk, I was struck by the profound Christian humanism of his idea of “living within the truth.” (4) Catholics today need to see their discipleship and mission as precisely that: “living within the truth.”

Living within the truth means living according to Jesus Christ and God’s Word in Sacred Scripture. It means proclaiming the truth of the Christian Gospel, not only by our words but by our example. It means living every day and every moment from the unshakeable conviction that God lives, and that his love is the motive force of human history and the engine of every authentic human life. It means believing that the truths of the Creed are worth suffering and dying for.

Living within the truth also means telling the truth and calling things by their right names. And that means exposing the lies by which some men try to force others to live.

Two of the biggest lies in the world today are these: first, that Christianity was of relatively minor importance in the development of the West; and second, that Western values and institutions can be sustained without a grounding in Christian moral principles.

Before I talk about these two falsehoods, we should pause a moment to think about the meaning of history.

History is not simply about learning facts. History is a form of memory, and memory is a foundation stone of self-identity. Facts are useless without a context of meaning. The unique genius and meaning of Western civilization cannot be understood without the 20 centuries of Christian context in which they developed.

A people who do not know their history, do not know themselves. They are a people doomed to repeat the mistakes of their past because they cannot see what the present – which always flowers out of the past -- requires of them.

People who forget who they are can be much more easily manipulated. This was dramatized famously in Orwell’s image of the “memory hole” in his novel 1984. Today, the history of the Church and the legacy of Western Christianity are being pushed down the memory hole. This is the first lie that we need to face.

Downplaying the West’s Christian past is sometimes done with the best intentions, from a desire to promote peaceful co-existence in a pluralistic society. But more frequently it’s done to marginalize Christians and to neutralize the Church’s public witness.

The Church needs to name and fight this lie. To be a European or an American is to be heir to a profound Christian synthesis of Greek philosophy and art, Roman law, and biblical truth. This synthesis gave rise to the Christian humanism that undergirds all of Western civilization.

On this point, we might remember the German Lutheran scholar and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote these words in the months leading up to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943: “The unity of the West is not an idea but a historical reality, of which the sole foundation is Christ.” (5)

Our societies in the West are Christian by birth, and their survival depends on the endurance of Christian values. Our core principles and political institutions are based, in large measure, on the morality of the Gospel and the Christian vision of man and government.

We are talking here not only about Christian theology or religious ideas. We are talking about the moorings of our societies -- representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience; and most importantly, the dignity of the human person.

This truth about the essential unity of the West has a corollary, as Bonhoeffer also observed: Take away Christ and you remove the only reliable foundation for our values, institutions and way of life.

That means we cannot dispense with our history out of some superficial concern over offending our non-Christian neighbors. Notwithstanding the chatter of the “new atheists,” there is no risk that Christianity will ever be forced upon people anywhere in the West.

The only “confessional states” in the world today are those ruled by Islamist or atheist dictatorships -- regimes that have rejected the Christian West’s belief in individual rights and the balance of powers.

I would argue that the defense of Western ideals is the only protection that we and our neighbors have against a descent into new forms of repression -- whether it might be at the hands of extremist Islam or secularist technocrats.

But indifference to our Christian past contributes to indifference about defending our values and institutions in the present. And this brings me to the second big lie by which we live today -- the lie that there is no unchanging truth.

Relativism is now the civil religion and public philosophy of the West. Again, the arguments made for this viewpoint can seem persuasive. Given the pluralism of the modern world, it might seem to make sense that society should want to affirm that no one individual or group has a monopoly on truth; that what one person considers to be good and desirable another may not; and that all cultures and religions should be respected as equally valid.

In practice, however, we see that without a belief in fixed moral principles and transcendent truths, our political institutions and language become instruments in the service of a new barbarism.

In the name of tolerance we come to tolerate the cruelest intolerance; respect for other cultures comes to dictate disparagement of our own; the teaching of “live and let live” justifies the strong living at the expense of the weak.

This diagnosis helps us understand one of the foundational injustices in the West today -- the crime of abortion.

I realize that the abortion license is a matter of current law in almost every nation in the West. In some cases, this license reflects the will of the majority and is enforced through legal and democratic means. And I’m aware that many people, even in the Church, find it strange that we Catholics in America still make the sanctity of unborn life so central to our public witness.

Let me tell you why I believe abortion is the crucial issue of our age.

First, because abortion, too, is about living within the truth. The right to life is the foundation of every other human right. If that right is not inviolate, then no right can be guaranteed. Or to put it more bluntly: Homicide is homicide, no matter how small the victim.

Here’s another truth that many persons in the Church have not yet fully reckoned: The defense of newborn and preborn life has been a central element of Catholic identity since the Apostolic Age.

I’ll say that again: From the earliest days of the Church, to be Catholic has meant refusing in any way to participate in the crime of abortion -- either by seeking an abortion, performing one, or making this crime possible through actions or inactions in the political or judicial realm. More than that, being Catholic has meant crying out against all that offends the sanctity and dignity of life as it has been revealed by Jesus Christ.

The evidence can be found in the earliest documents of Church history. In our day -- when the sanctity of life is threatened not only by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, but also by embryonic research and eugenic temptations to eliminate the weak, the disabled and the infirm elderly -- this aspect of Catholic identity becomes even more vital to our discipleship.

My point in mentioning abortion is this: Its widespread acceptance in the West shows us that without a grounding in God or a higher truth, our democratic institutions can very easily become weapons against our own human dignity.

Our most cherished values cannot be defended by reason alone, or simply for their own sake. They have no self-sustaining or “internal” justification.

There is no inherently logical or utilitarian reason why society should respect the rights of the human person. There is even less reason for recognizing the rights of those whose lives impose burdens on others, as is the case with the child in the womb, the terminally ill, or the physically or mentally disabled.

If human rights do not come from God, then they devolve to the arbitrary conventions of men and women. The state exists to defend the rights of man and to promote his flourishing. The state can never be the source of those rights. When the state arrogates to itself that power, even a democracy can become totalitarian.

What is legalized abortion but a form of intimate violence that clothes itself in democracy? The will to power of the strong is given the force of law to kill the weak.

That is where we are heading in the West today. And we’ve been there before. Slovaks and many other central and eastern Europeans have lived through it.

I suggested earlier that the Church’s religious liberty is under assault today in ways not seen since the Nazi and Communist eras. I believe we are now in the position to better understand why.

Writing in the 1960s, Richard Weaver, an American scholar and social philosopher, said: “I am absolutely convinced that relativism must eventually lead to a regime of force.”

He was right. There is a kind of “inner logic” that leads relativism to repression.

This explains the paradox of how Western societies can preach tolerance and diversity while aggressively undermining and penalizing Catholic life. The dogma of tolerance cannot tolerate the Church’s belief that some ideas and behaviors should not be tolerated because they dehumanize us. The dogma that all truths are relative cannot allow the thought that some truths might not be.

The Catholic beliefs that most deeply irritate the orthodoxies of the West are those concerning abortion, sexuality and the marriage of man and woman. This is no accident. These Christian beliefs express the truth about human fertility, meaning and destiny.

These truths are subversive in a world that would have us believe that God is not necessary and that human life has no inherent nature or purpose.

Thus the Church must be punished because, despite all the sins and weaknesses of her people, she is still the bride of Jesus Christ; still a source of beauty, meaning and hope that refuses to die -- and still the most compelling and dangerous heretic of the world’s new order.

Let me sum up what I’ve been saying.

My first point is this: Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have bad consequences. Today we are living in a world that is under the sway of some very destructive ideas, the worst being that men and women can live as if God does not matter and as if the Son of God never walked this earth.

As a result of these bad ideas, the Church’s freedom to exercise her mission is under attack. We need to understand why that is, and we need to do something about it.

My second point is simply this: We can no longer afford to treat the debate over secularization -- which really means cauterizing Christianity out of our cultural memory -- as if it’s a problem for Church professionals.

The emergence of a “new Europe” and a “next America” rooted in something other than the real facts of our Christian-shaped history will have damaging consequences for every serious believer.

We need not and should not abandon the hard work of honest dialogue. Far from it. The Church always needs to seek friendships, areas of agreement, and ways to make positive, reasoned arguments in the public square. But it’s foolish to expect gratitude or even respect from our governing and cultural leadership classes today. Naïve imprudence is not an evangelical virtue.

The temptation in every age of the Church is to try to get along with Caesar. And it’s very true: Scripture tells us to respect and pray for our leaders. We need to have a healthy love for the countries we call home. But we can never render unto Caesar what belongs to God.

We need to obey God first; the obligations of political authority always come second. We cannot collaborate with evil without gradually becoming evil ourselves. This is one of the most vividly harsh lessons of the 20th century. And it’s a lesson that I hope we have learned.

That brings me to my third and final point today: We live in a time when the Church is called to be a believing community of resistance. We need to call things by their true names. We need to fight the evils we see. And most importantly, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that by going along with the voices of secularism and de-Christianization we can somehow mitigate or change things.

Only the Truth can set men free. We need to be apostles of Jesus Christ and the Truth he incarnates.

So what does this mean for us as individual disciples? Let me offer a few suggestions by way of a conclusion.

My first suggestion comes again from the great witness against the paganism of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The renewal of the Western world lies solely in the divine renewal of the Church, which leads her to the fellowship of the risen and living Jesus Christ.” (7)

The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions and in our public and private witness. The world needs each of us to come to a deeper experience of our Risen Lord in the company of our fellow believers. The renewal of the West depends overwhelmingly on our faithfulness to Jesus Christ and his Church.

We need to really believe what we say we believe. Then we need to prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths, to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the point of our own discomfort and suffering.

We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge of forgetting him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the dialogue of salvation.

The lesson of the 20th century is that there is no cheap grace. This God whom we believe in, this God who loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to suffer and die for it, demands that we live the same bold, sacrificial pattern of life shown to us by Jesus Christ.

The form of the Church, and the form of every Christian life, is the form of the cross. Our lives must become a liturgy, a self-offering that embodies the love of God and the renewal of the world.

The great Slovak martyrs of the past knew this. And they kept this truth alive when the bitter weight of hatred and totalitarianism pressed upon your people. I’m thinking especially right now of your heroic bishops, Blessed Vasil Hopko and Pavel Gojdic, and the heroic sister, Blessed Zdenka Schelingová.

We need to keep this beautiful mandate of Sister Zdenka close to our hearts:

“My sacrifice, my holy Mass, begins in daily life. From the altar of the Lord I go to the altar of my work. I must be able to continue the sacrifice of the altar in every situation. … It is Christ whom we must proclaim through our lives, to him we offer the sacrifice of our own will.” (8)

Let us preach Jesus Christ with all the energy of our lives. And let us support each other -- whatever the cost -- so that when we make our accounting to the Lord, we will be numbered among the faithful and courageous, and not the cowardly or the evasive, or those who compromised until there was nothing left of their convictions; or those who were silent when they should have spoken the right word at the right time. Thank you. And God bless all of you.

Endnotes:

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 9 (New York: Library of America, 2004), 340.
2. Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), 14.
3. John 8:32.
4. See Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990 (New York: Knopf, 1991), 125–214.
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: SCM, 1983), 72–73.
6. Richard Weaver, “Relativism and the Crisis of our Times” (1961), in In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929–1963 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 104.
7. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 95.
8. See “Novena to the Blessed Zdenka Schelingová,” at www.holycrosssisters.org/s_zdenka.html.

Great to read the discourses of Fr Rutler and Archbishop Chaput. I found Chaput's speech very clear, logical and inspiring. Many bewildered laypeople could, by reading this, get a summary of the why and how of the ills of present day society and the attacks aginst the Christian faith. Thanks for posting!


Hi, Mags! Sorry for the belated response, but I was away most of Sunday and it always takes me some time to recover my work rhythm on the Forum especially if I must first catch up on what has happened while I was away. Worse if I can't keep awake until I am able to catch up....

I have great hopes for Mons. Chaput - he's part American Indian - and it would be great down the line eventually to have him as a potential Pope. I find his unqualified orthodoxy and clarity of thought and language truly outstanding among the current crop of bishops who make the news. A fearless and blunt orthodoxy he shares with Mons. Burke. The impressive thing is that they proclaim their orthodoxy so well and openly. Offhand, I can only think of Italy's Cardinal Bagnasco as being in the same mold. Cardinal Scola may be more intellectual but he strikes me in many ways as being, like Cardinal Schoenborn, too transparently aware of his 'papabile' stock and working at it... Meanwhile, we all pray Benedict XVI will be with us a long long while, and I am rather livid about the British jorunalist whose idea of writing a preparatory story on the Pope's visit was to sing the praises of a 'papabile' who will be travelling with him - Ghana's Cardinal Turkson, about whom I do hope to learn more but not in such an inopportune manner!

As for Fr. Rutler, what makes him even more interesting is that he was an Episcopalina minister first!

TERESA

Here's a sick twist on the 'priest cover-up' charges - because the crime alleged in this case is mass murder!


Irish bishop disputes media claim
alleging a priest was involved
in a 1972 bombing that killed 9



DERRY, Northern Ireland, AUG. 30, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The retired bishop of Derry is protesting assumptions from the media that a priest, recently implicated in a police report on the 1972 Claudy Bombing, was guilty of mass murder.

Bishop Edward Daly stated this in an opinion article published today by the Irish News, in which he responded to a public report from a police ombudsman for Northern Ireland published Aug. 24 regarding the Claudy Bombing of July 31, 1972.

The tragedy involved three car bombs and resulted in nine deaths, including an 8-year-old girl and two adolescents.

The recent police report implicated Father James Chesney, who was at that time a priest at a nearby parish, but died in 1980 at age 46.

Bishop Daly, who headed the Derry Diocese from 1974 to 1993, stated: "Does anyone sincerely believe that if Cardinal [Cahal] Conway and my predecessor Bishop [Neil] Farren believed a mass murderer was in the Church's ranks they would have permitted him to continue in the active priesthood?

"I cannot believe they would have omitted to tell me when I was appointed as Bishop of Derry in 1974 if they had for a moment believed one of the priests in my future diocese was a mass murderer."

"Mass murder cannot be compared with any other sin or crime," the prelate affirmed. "It is the foulest and most obscene of deeds."

"I witnessed mass murder at first hand in 1972," he recalled. "I am more aware than most of how appalling and grotesque it is and the enormity of it."

The bishop continued, "It is a huge insult to suggest I would knowingly allow someone whom I knew to be a mass murderer to serve as a priest in my diocese."

Bishop Daly lamented the media's coverage of the recent police report, noting that "the once sacrosanct presumption of innocence has been dispensed with and replaced with a presumption of guilt."

"Now, media portray as fact unsubstantiated claims emanating from agencies whose history is anything but clean," he noted.

The prelate said, "I find media coverage of the Claudy Report very disquieting."

He harkened back to a time years ago when journalists "soared above the pressures of spin from government and combatants on all sides" and "did not sheepishly follow Establishment or State."

He noted that the press has put forth only "theories," and has "not questioned key aspects of the ombudsman's report."

The bishop asserted, "I am not at all convinced that Father Chesney was involved in the Claudy bombings."

The prelate admitted "constructive scepticism" about these allegations against the priest, arising from "personal involvement in several major miscarriage of justice cases."

He continued: "I have seen convictions based on signed admissions and forensic evidence completely overturned years later.

"Father Chesney was never arrested, questioned, charged or convicted. He cannot answer for himself. He has been dead 30 years."

The prelate noted that when he himself lived in South Derry during those years, "I was often terrified and humiliated by the treatment and delays I experienced at security force checkpoints as I returned from confirmations and other pastoral duties late at night."

In this light, reflecting on the strict law enforcement at that time and in the following years, the prelate asserted, "Why was the ombudsman unable to find evidence against him after years of investigation?"

Nonetheless, the bishop underlined the importance of carrying out a thorough investigation, stating, "Claudy has at last received its legitimate and long overdue recognition as one of Northern Ireland's most despicable acts of terror."

He concluded, "I will continue to pray that 'the truth will out.' The families, the community and Father Chesney's relatives need to hear it."

Cardinal Bagnasco tells Italians
a culture without children
and elderly is warped



ROME, Italy (Zenit.org) - A culture without children and without elderly people is seriously warped and unable to function, says the president of the Italian Episcopal Conference.


Benedict XVI offered a Golden Rose for the Madonna when he visited Genoa in May 2008.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa, made this affirmation Sunday when he celebrated the solemnity of the Madonna della Guardia with a Mass at the shrine of Liguria at the top of Mount Figogna.

The prelate reflected on the beauty of fidelity and on the family as the "womb of life."

Speaking of Italy's negative birthrate (-0.047%), the cardinal asserted that "demographic balance is not only necessary for the physical survival of a community -- which without children has no future -- but is also a condition for that alliance between generations that is essential for a normal democratic dialectic."

He said the Church's long-time assertion that a demographic crisis points to a "serious cultural catastrophe" is because of this.

A lack of children creates not only a bleak future, the cardinal reflected, but also a "lack of balance between generations" and an "educational poverty."

"Boys and girls and young people, in fact, constrain us to engage in discussions, make us come out of ourselves, we who, because of age and feebleness, tend to fall back on our own immediate needs," the cardinal proposed. "It is not only parents that, having children, must change their points of view and styles, they must plan and organize themselves in relation to the children in their various ages."

"A society without babies and children," he continued, "just as a society without the elderly, is seriously mutilated and unable to function."

Cardinal Bagnasco observed that the issue of falling birthrates is linked to cultural values.

"If we look at the sacred image of Our Lady with the Child we do not have to make an effort to imagine the life of Nazareth: they lived in absolute simplicity, in the joyful toil of daily work, at home and in the carpenter's shop; they lived the life of the village, relationships with their next door neighbors, participation in worship, the presence of God," he reflected.

"Everything makes one think of a profound and positive adherence to life as a gift that is given and which is not our absolute property," the cardinal said. "It makes one perceive the awareness of being within the history of generations, of a tradition that does not coerce but helps. In a word, we feel the breath of hope."

On the contrary, Cardinal Bagnasco contended, in the cultural climate of today, couples and families seem to collapse before "the blows of life and of relationships."

"The efforts of every day seem tedious and without meaning, hence unbearable," he considered. "The future loses value and polish, the present is emphasized for what it promises of immediate satisfaction."

In this context, the prelate said, "fidelity is understood as something repetitive, tedious, deprived of thrills."

But fidelity is the condition of growth, Cardinal Bagnasco affirmed. Love in family life is transformed over time: "from the initial effervescence, it changes into something more profound and rooted, strengthened by joys and efforts."

"In this growth, the daily repetition of so many little and great duties, of so many actions that seem grey, is like the tranquil and continuous rain that bathes the earth and fertilizes it," he suggested. "It is not the storm of great passions and impetuous transports that make one grow or that measure the substance of love, but daily and humble fidelity in the sign of love."

The Italian prelate affirmed that the family is a "school of humanity and faith."

One learns to love by being loved, one learns to trust in oneself, one discovers "the beauty of the different ages," he said. And in the family, one sees firsthand the values of acceptance, humility, reliability and the "miraculous power of forgiveness given and received, of the ability to endure."

In the family there is also "prayer made together every day, participation in Sunday Mass, liturgical festivities with their traditions, pilgrimages to shrines, sacred images in the home," the cardinal added. Every word is a lesson of faith, a "moment of that school that will leave a sign in the heart."

"Can a mother turn away from the gaze of her children?" Cardinal Bagnasco reflected. "We know it is impossible, and this is sufficient to look ahead with trust."


I truly wish I had the time to trasnlate Cardinal bagnaso's homily in full, It is available on the website of teh Dioece of Genoa.

German bishops expand sex abuse guidelines
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER and MELISSA EDDY



BERLIN, August 31 (AP) - Germany's Roman Catholic church introduced new guidelines Tuesday on handling reports of sexual abuse that require prosecutors to be informed of any suspected case unless the victim objects to that.

The expanded guidelines come in response to hundreds of allegations of abuse at the hands of clergy that emerged earlier this year and rocked the church in Germany, Pope Benedict XVI's homeland.

Most cases date back years, if not decades, and the statute of limitations has passed on the majority of them. Often victims were afraid to report abuse, and the Catholic Church has been accused of covering up abuse cases it knew about, and not telling prosecutors about them.

Stephan Ackermann, the bishop of Trier who was tapped by church authorities to lead the revision of guidelines drawn up in 2002, said special attention had been given to the issue of involving law enforcement officials.

"Because in the past it has led to misunderstandings, I stress again that the investigations by Church authorities and by prosecutors are parallel investigations," Ackermann told reporters in Trier on Tuesday.

The earlier guidelines only "advised" that priests contact prosecutors on their own in "proven cases" of abuse. Church authorities were not required to contact law enforcement officials.

Yet critics charged Tuesday that the revamped rules do not go far enough in addressing the issue of abuse, by failing to clarify issues of financial compensation for victims and by allowing offending clergy to continue to serve within the Church.

"Once he has been an offender, we really don't want someone like that in the diocese anymore, even working in a nursing home or a prison," said Christian Weisner of the We Are Church group, insisting there should be a "zero tolerance" policy on abuse in Germany.

Under the new guidelines, offenders are to be removed from jobs involving work with children and to undergo assessment by professionals to indicate what kind of jobs they are to be allowed to do.

The German government said it welcomed the bishops' efforts to work more closely with prosecutors, but criticized the fact that the new guidelines left open what the Church would do if a victim demanded that prosecutors not get involved.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said the basic principle should be one of "immediately informing prosecuting authorities about suspected cases."

Ackermann argued that many victims would shy away from informing the Church at all if that meant prosecutors would have to get involved immediately.

The American victims' group SNAP criticized the new guidelines as inadequate in general.

"The problem isn't inadequate policies, it's a corrupt structure and system in which bishops exercise virtually limitless power and are accountable to virtually no one," Barbara Blaine of the American victims' group SNAP told The Associated Press.

However, the new rules require each diocese to have at least one "commissioner" who is not part of its leadership to serve as the first point of contact for anyone wishing to report a case of suspected abuse by clerics, monks, employees or volunteers working for the church.

The rules also say that as soon as there are any credible indications of sexual abuse of minors a church figure "shall forward the information to the state criminal prosecution authority."

The new guidelines define what is considered sexual abuse based on the definition used by common German law and require that suspected offenders be immediately removed from any duties that involve contact with children and young people.

Prevention measures include requiring anyone who works with children or youths to show proof of good conduct and undergo sensitivity training for personnel management.

The Bishops Conference reworked its original guidelines amid criticism that they did not go far enough in involving law enforcement officials in sex abuse cases. The new guidelines are valid for three years, at which point they are to be reviewed again.

This is Cardinal George's column in the current issue of the Archdiocese of Chicago's weekly newspaper. Cardinal George is the preisdent of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).


Liturgy: translation and much more

August 29, 2010


On July 24, 2010, the Apostolic See of Rome confirmed the proper calendar, texts and adaptations for the dioceses of the United States of the third edition of the Roman Missal in the English language. The parishes of this and other dioceses in our country will begin using this missal on Nov. 27, 2011, the first Sunday of the liturgical season of Advent.

What does this decree mean? First of all, it means that a translation project begun 10 years ago to bring from Latin into English the third edition of the official missal for public worship in the Church is now complete. The book will soon be in the hands of the publishing companies.

Secondly, it means that information about the new translation will have to be given in a systematic way, because much of the information found so far in various articles and new stories has been incomplete and sometimes erroneous.

The priests who celebrate Mass here, both archdiocesan and religious order priests, will come together on Oct. 19 for a full day of study. Other opportunities will also be available for the priests and deacons; and the Office for Divine Worship, under the direction of Todd Williamson and with the help of many trained in liturgy, will put on workshops for the laity. We should be somewhat familiar with the text by the time we begin to use it for public worship.

This third edition of the Roman Missal includes new eucharistic prayers, prefaces and feast days. The text will sound somewhat different than what we have become used to in praying with the second edition, now in use. Some sentences will be longer, but no longer than the sentences used in Polish and Spanish for the past 40 years.

The English vocabulary will be richer, and the tone will be more expressive of our humility before a God who is so merciful that he gives us the power to address him in prayer.

The translations have been made with singing them in mind, so there should be more music in the eucharistic celebration. Liturgical musicians have been working on adaptations and new melodies for the Mass chants.

Postures, gestures and symbols will remain what they are now, because we are already using the General Introduction to the Roman Missal to regulate our movements at Mass.

But we can renew our appreciation of these instructions, with special attention to the symbols used at Mass and the unity of the rites. They were simplified in the liturgical renewal after the Second Vatican Council so that their meaning would be more evident to all.

Thirdly, however, the time spent preparing to receive and use this new text can be a long moment to look again at what the Mass is, at what we are doing to participate fully and actively in its celebration, and how the liturgy connects us to the life of the entire Church for the sake of the conversion of the world.

This next year and a half can be a blessed time for us, bearing good fruit in our life of prayer and service, if we take the time to deepen our understanding of ourselves as a priestly people, a eucharistic assembly.

It is evident to me, as I go from parish to parish, that the archdiocese has worked hard in the last 40 years to implement the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The results are not entirely uniform, but good effort is made everywhere.

The most important results, however, show up outside the texts and gestures and actions, in the hearts and minds of those who pray the liturgy and in the activities in which they engage to transform the world.

When I was a young seminarian, one of my favorite spiritual authors was Catherine de Hueck Doherty, a Russian noblewoman who came to live in this country and in Canada and who was very conscious of the connection between the Church’s worship and the Church’s mission.

In 1938 she wrote: “The daily sacrifice, fully participated in, will open to us the mind of Christ, and we will radiate him in our lives. And then we shall be able to go forth and fight the good fight of Christ against poverty, misery, injustice. Participation in the Mass will teach us the full understanding of the Mystical Body of Christ, leading us to a Christian sociology which is the cornerstone of the Christian social order and which alone can save our mad world from destruction.”

We begin now a time of preparation, together. It should be a joyful time, preparing us to sing a joyful song to the Lord, together as his people.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

Church-commissioned report reveals
some 500 accusations of sex abuses
by Belgian priests in the past 70 years
By JOHN W. MILLER



LEUVEN, Belgium, Sept 11 (AFP) — An independent commission Friday released a report detailing hundreds of previously undocumented cases of sex abuse in Belgium's Catholic church, and recommended that the church establish victims' groups and a treatment center for abusive priests to prevent future incidents.

"Victims deserve a church brave enough to confront its vulnerability and find a fair response," the commission said in a statement. The 200-page report caps a three-month investigation by the panel, which was set up by Belgium's Catholic church.

Belgian Catholic leaders declined to comment on the report. On Monday, they are slated to present plans for dealing with sexual abuse in the church.

The report documents cases of abuse over the past 70 years, involving 475 perpetrators, all men, and 506 victims, two-thirds of them male. The age most susceptible to abuse was 12, the commission reported, and there were 13 cases of suicide linked to abuse.

Three-quarters of the alleged abusers were priests, the rest were teachers or other authority figures such as leaders of school-activities groups. Two-thirds of the victims expressed no desire to file criminal complaints.

Some members of the commission resigned in protest, after police raided church property near Brussels on June 24, and removed documents on abuse cases.

Panel members who stepped down said they couldn't complete their work while police were investigating allegations of a coverup of sexual abuse by the Belgian Catholic church.

Excerpts from accounts in the report, translated from French or Dutch:

'I was not a child. I was 17 when the abusive relationship began….The feeling of guilt is suffocating me. I've gone through awful depressions that included suicide attempts.'

'Raped by a priest as a child, I myself became an abuser of adolescent boys. In 1994, I was sentenced to eight years in prison.'

'In 1941, when I was 13 and naïve, I was grabbed in school by Mr. A....A few years later, my brother confessed to the same experience.'

'I belonged to a group of 11- and 12-year-olds who were abused by a priest, a Latin teacher, around 1950. I am now 71 years old and have never said anything to anybody. Given the current circumstances, I consider it my duty to tell society. The offender is now deceased.'

"There's enormous frustration that we couldn't finish our job after all these people came forward," said Commission Chairman Peter Adriaenssens, a 53-year-old child psychiatrist. Panel members said they had hoped to solicit testimony from more victims before preparing their report.

As in many Western European countries, Belgium has been slow to confront sexual abuse in a church which once oversaw society from cradle to grave.

That changed in April with the high-profile resignation of the former bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who confessed to sexually abusing his nephew for many years.

Outrage increased with the recent publication of transcripts of recordings of Cardinal Godfried Danneels advising the nephew not to go public with the story.

Transcripts showed that Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels helped to cover up the issue involving Bishop Roger Vangheluwe.

Belgium has no law mandating that church officials report sexual-abuse crimes to authorities.

Msgr. Danneels, who has retired as Cardinal of Belgium [Not as Cardinal - only as Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and therfore Primate of Belgium], this week admitted wrongdoing and apologized.

Msgr. Vangheluwe is living in Westvleteren monastery in Belgium. He hasn't been charged or defrocked.

Forty-three percent of the victims whose accounts are in the commission's report came forward in the week after the Vangheluwe story broke.

"The Vangheluwe case was a landmark because it was the first time people saw you could have a normal, famous person who was actually a hidden sociopath," Dr. Adriaenssens said.

The report, published in French and Dutch and available online, includes 124 anonymous testimonies from victims.

"Their stories help answer the question of how there could have been so much abuse and nobody said anything," said Dr. Adriaenssens. He blames church leaders "for giving psycho-sociopaths a place to hide for many years."

Victims-rights groups acknowledged the panel's work, but said the more important job is implementing justice.

"The head of the panel is a respected psychologist, but this is not a job for a psychologist, it's a job for police and prosecutors," says David Clohessy, director of Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests in the U.S.

Mr. Clohessy and others say that lack of accountability for the church's 4,000 bishops is to blame.

"This isn't just about priests abusing boys. It's about nobody ever getting punished for covering it up," he said.

On Thursday, a Belgian court returned records seized by police in the June raid of church offices. Prosecutors said their investigation will continue.

"It is in everybody's interest that the rule of law is respected," said Archbishop André-Joseph Leonard.

New Chinese bishop
pledges loyalty to Pope

September 21, 2010



Father Peter Wu Junwei was ordained the third bishop of Xinjiang (Yuncheng) diocese with both papal approval and government recognition today.

In his speech, Bishop Wu thanked Pope Benedict XVI for his appointment and trust. “I am determined to be loyal to the Pope forever,” he said.

He also urged his flock to follow the example of Saint Matthew the Apostle, whose feast is celebrated today, to give up everything to follow Jesus and spread the Gospel.

He told ucanews.com he will give priority to diocesan priests’ spiritual formation as they have not had a retreat together since 2006.

The former rector of the Shanxi Montecorvino Major Seminary is also concerned about laity formation. Though the local Church baptized many in recent decades, the number of Catholics remains small, he said.

The diocese now has 28 priests and about 40 nuns serving 15,000 Catholics, two-thirds of whom are farmers.

The 48-year-old bishop comes from a staunch Catholic family. His brother is a priest while his sister is a nun. Their great granduncle, Saint Peter Wu Anbang, was martyred during the Boxer Uprising of 1900. He was canonized among the 120 Chinese martyrs in 2000.

The ordination in northern Shanxi province was officiated by Bishop John Huo Cheng of Fenyang, assisted by Coadjutor Bishop Paul Meng Ningyou of Taiyuan who was just ordained five days ago, Bishop Joseph Li Shan of Beijing and Coadjutor Bishop John Baptist Yang Xiaoting of Yan’an (Yulin).

All the bishops have papal approval and government recognition.

About 140 priests concelebrated the Mass at the cathedral in Xinjiang county for about 2,000 people.

Profile of Bishop Wu:

• Born in 1962, the eldest of six children
• Studied at the Xinjiang minor seminary and the Taiyuan major seminary
• Ordained a priest for Taiyuan diocese in 1990
• Served at a parish 1991-1996
• Served simultaneously as rector of Taiyuan’s minor seminary, diocesan treasurer and director of Church affairs from 1996-2001
• Rector of the Shanxi Montecorvino Major Seminary from 2001-2009
• Appointed by the Pope as third bishop of Xinjiang in May 2009
• Elected bishop candidate by the local Church in September 2009

A promise to Pope John Paul II
by George Weigel

Sept. 15, 2010

On the evening of December 15, 2004, I had dinner in the papal apartment with Pope John Paul II and several of his aides. Although his health had been deteriorating steadily for years, the Pope was in good form that night, his sense of humor intact and sharp.

Knowing that he liked large photo albums, I gave him a volume on national parks of the United States as a Christmas present. When an aide opened the book to Rocky Mountain National Park, the Pope put on as much of a smile as his Parkinson’s disease would permit and said, “Denver: World Youth Day 1993! The bishops of the United States said it couldn’t be done. I proved them wrong!”

We all laughed as John Paul flipped through the pages; in his mind’s eye, he was back hiking in the Rockies.

The conversation over dinner was wide-ranging, and at one point, after the usual papal kidding about my having written “a very big book,” John Paul asked about the international reception of Witness to Hope, his biography, which I had published five years earlier.

He was particularly happy when I told him that a Chinese edition was in the works, as he knew he would never get to that vast land himself. As that part of the conversation was winding down, I looked across the table and, referring to the fact that Witness to Hope had only taken the John Paul II story up to early 1999, I made the Pope a promise: “Holy Father,” I said, “if you don’t bury me, I want you to know that I’ll finish your story.”

It was the last time we saw each other, this side of the Kingdom of God.



The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II – The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, which was published by Doubleday on September 14, is the fulfillment of the promise I made to John Paul during our last evening together.

In addition to revisiting Karol Wojtyla’s epic battle with communism through the prism of previously classified and top-secret communist files, given to me by Polish researchers, the book offers a detailed account of the drama of the Pope’s last six years:
- the Great Jubilee of 2000 and his historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land;
- September 11th, and the Pope’s efforts to frustrate Osama bin Laden’s insistence that his war with the West was a religious crusade;
- the Long Lent of 2002, when the Church in America grappled with the twin crises of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance;
- John Paul’s ongoing efforts to build bridges of dialogue and reconciliation with the Churches of the Christian East;
- his struggle with illness, which brought him into at least one “dark night” spiritually; and
- his heroic last months, in which his priestly death became, metaphorically, his last encyclical.

The End and the Beginning concludes with a lengthy evaluation of Karol Wojtyla, the man, and John Paul II, the Pope. There, I’m able to tell some stories not previously on the public record, while assessing all that went right, and the things that went wrong, in one of history’s most significant pontificates.

The story of Wojtyla vs. communism in The End and the Beginning is by no means simply a reprise of Witness to Hope; on the contrary, the Polish, East German, Soviet, and Hungarian secret police and foreign ministry files I obtained from Polish colleagues shed new, and often dramatic, light on the communist effort to destroy John Paul’s work and his reputation, as well as on communist efforts to penetrate the Leonine Wall and recruit collaborators in the Vatican.

In a world quickly forgetting what the Cold War was about, these once-secret classified documents are a powerful reminder that, as John Paul’s longtime secretary once put it to me, “It was ‘we and they,’ ‘us and them,’ all the time.” And they were not scrupulous about playing the hardest of hardball.

John Paul II was the great Christian witness of this era. Telling his story in full has been the privilege of a lifetime.

I watched about twenty minutes of it online a few hours ago. From what I could see, the Cathedral was packed full.

-----------------------------------------------------

The Catholic Herald: 22/09/10

Two of the alleged Marian seers from the Bosnian town of Medjugorje have been invited to speak at Vienna’s Catholic cathedral.

Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti and Ivan Dragicevic will speak tomorrow at the Stephansdom in Vienna as part of a peace initiative organised by the Community “Oasis of Peace”. They are two of the six seers who have reportedly had Marian apparitions since 1981. Miss Pavlovic-Lunetti allegedly receives messages from the Virgin Mary every month. Since the first sighting, she has reportedly appeared to the seers over 40,000 times, imparting hundreds of messages.

The authenticity of the Marian apparitions in Bosnia-Herzogovina is currently under review by the Vatican. A report in July from the Italian news agency ANSA said that the commission, established in March this year and run by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, was considering interviewing the alleged seers.

Annually about one million pilgrims travel to Medjugorje even though the place has not been declared a shrine and “official” pilgrimages are forbidden by the Vatican. The 1991 Zadar declaration, made by the bishops of former Yugoslavia, ruled that the apparitions were “not established as supernatural” and could therefore not be authenticated.

Earlier this year, the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, caused some controversy after travelling to Medjugorje and celebrating Mass there. He said his visit was in part to “de-dramatise” the “Medjugorje phenomenon”. He said the alleged Marian apparitions were secondary to the “school of normal Christian life”.

He said he had gone to Medjugorje to see the tree which bore fruits such as Cenacolo, a community which helps rehabilitate drug users.

Cardinal Schönborn, who leads the Austrian bishops’ conference and is a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), said he did not want to pre-empt the Vatican’s ruling by visiting.

Bishop Ratko Peric of Mostar-Duvno is strongly opposed to the phenomenon and expressed his dismay at the cardinal’s visit in January.

The event at St Stephen’s Cathedral also includes Sister Elvira Petrozzi, the founder of the Cenacolo community, and will be followed by Mass and Eucharistic Adoration. Organisers expect hundreds of young people to attend.

Cardinal Schönborn took part in the event last year and told the press he was moved by the number of people who had come to the cathedral, to rediscover the sacraments.

The Medjugorje Commission, appointed by the CDF, includes the Slovakian Cardinal Jozef Tomko, retired prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo, Cardinal Julian Herranz, and Archbishop Angelo Amato, prefect for the Congregation for Saints’ Causes and former secretary of the CDF.

www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2010/09/22/medjugorje-seers-to-speak-at-vienna-ca...

te-deum.blogspot.com/ (A running commentary)

Rowan Williams's authority goes up in smoke
as he replies 'Pass' to a question
about eventual gay bishops

September 25th, 2010


From behind the (London) Times’s paywall, the sound of the Archbishop of Canterbury digging a hole for himself so deep that it will soon swallow him up.

Dr Rowan Williams has given a disastrous interview to the paper today that leads his interviewer, Ginny Dougary, to describe his position on homosexuality as “both confusing and rather revolting”.

Well, she’s certainly right on the first count. Here’s my paraphrase of the Archbishop’s current position:

Does he still think it’s OK for gay couples to have sex, as he wrote years ago? “That’s what I wrote as a theologian, you know, putting forward a suggestion. That’s not the job I have now,” he tells Dougary.

No gay bishops, then? Actually, gay bishops are OK, as long as they don’t have sex. (The same prohibition doesn’t apply to lay people, for reasons lost in the mist of time.)

So it’s appropriate for the celibate Jeffrey John to be a bishop? Here +Rowan really squirms, saying he “let down” John by blocking him as Bishop of Reading. But we don’t discover why, this year, the still-celibate Dean John unexpectedly disappeared from the candidates’ list for Southwark.

But does the Archbishop hope that one day gay bishops can have partners? “Pass”.

Yes, he really did say that. Now, you may regard Roman Catholic teaching on homosexuality as wrong, amounting to a declaration that it’s OK to be left-handed but not to write with your left hand, but it is at least clear. It’s inconceivable that Benedict XVI would produce the game-show reply “Pass” to a question about sexual morality.

What will it take, I wonder, for my liberal Catholic friends to recognise that – irrespective of your views on this matter – Rowan Williams emerges from this debate neither as a radical prophet nor a defender of biblical morality, but as a source of confusion and anxiety?


Archbishop of Canterbury
fails to bridge gay row gap

26 Sep 2010

In an extensive newspaper interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says there is "no problem" with gay clergy and bishops.

But he adds that because of the controversy in the Church and the lack of consensus for change on the basis of inherited teaching and conservative interpretation of the Bible, non-celibate homosexual clergy cannot be endorsed.

The comments have already produced an angry reaction from both sides in the argument between those who wish to exclude LGBT people from the church's ministry, and those who argue that the central dynamics of the Christian Gospel points towards inclusion and embrace.

Dr Williams' lengthy interview with The Times newspaper on Saturday 25 September 2010 is not freely available on the internet, because of proprietor Rupert Murdoch's imposition of a 'pay wall', but it has been picked up through excerpts in the wider media.

Conducted by Ginny Dougary, prior to Pope Benedict XVI's recent visit to Britain, the exchange is a wide ranging discussion of many of the current controversies surrounding Dr Williams' time as Archbishop of Canterbury.

It includes an account of Dr Williams' sense of personal failure in failing to support Dr Jeffrey Johns's election to a bishopric, his opposition to creationism, his reflection on Professor Stephen Hawking's category mistake in writing of the non-necessity of God, his experience of 9/11 (the Archbishop was in Manhattan at the time), relations with the Roman Catholic Church, the case for women bishops, and the "materially heretical" idea that making money is doing God's work.

It is Dr Williams's comments on gay clergy and bishops which have drawn instant attention from reporters and commentators, however.

He declared: "There’s no problem about a gay person who’s a bishop... It’s about the fact that there are traditionally, historically, standards that the clergy are expected to observe. So there’s always a question about the personal life of the clergy.”

Asked what is wrong with a gay bishop having a partner, the Archbishop replies: “I think because the scriptural and traditional approach to this doesn’t give much ground for being positive about it. The Church at the moment doesn’t quite know what to make of it...”

In the past, before assuming his key role within the Established Church, Dr Williams, as a pastor and acdemic, had affirmed gay relationships both pastorally and academically.

But he sees his priority now as holding the Church of England and the Anglican Communion - with its warring factions - together.

Responding to his latest remarks, gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell accused him of being inconsistent and hypocritical, while the hardline group Anglican Mainstream strongly objected to any gay bishops.

In its own leading article, The Times newspaper challenges the idea that the Church has no room for reform or change on traditional, scriptural grounds - which has been the basis of the argument for welcoming gay people advanced by a growing number of evangelicals in recent years.

The paper declared: "In seeking a settlement within Anglicanism, Dr Williams risks diminishing its prophetic voice. If he were to worry less about politics, he might find the resources to strengthen Anglicanism and find spiritual fulfilment of his own. For with his profound theological insight, Dr Williams is better placed than anyone to, in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, discern the signs of the times.

"Secular culture acknowledges the injustice of discrimination against homosexuals. The treatment of Canon Jeffrey John, a chaste homosexual twice rejected as a bishop, offends against a widely held sense of natural justice. In electing homosexual bishops, Anglicanism might suffer defections; but it would affirm its soul.

"This is not a call to choose modern mores over biblical authority, for Anglicans have long understood that the interpretation of Scripture lies in the hands of the Church. The Apostle Peter enjoined: 'Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.'

"Interpretation belongs to the tradition... in which Dr Williams takes an historic role. He should affirm as a Christian leader and a theologian that discrimination against homosexuals is wrong. In the Church, as in the nation, let justice be done — and the heavens will not fall," said the Times.

An entire Maryland Episcopal parish
will vote soon whether to become Catholic
By Randy Sly

10/1/2010


WASHINGTON, DC - In a letter to parishioners, the Reverend Jason Cantania, rector of Mount Calvary Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland, announced that the vestry of the parish had voted unanimously in favor of two resolutions.

First, they have voted to leave The Episcopal Church (TEC) where they are a part of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, and, second, to become an Anglican Use parish in the Catholic Church through the new initiative from Rome - the Apostolic Constitution Anglicorum Coetibus.

The entire Church membership will vote this month on the two resolutions.

Under the terms of this apostolic constitution, the Church has provided opportunities for "personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering full communion with the Catholic Church."

As an Anglican Use parish, they will be authorized to use an authorized version of the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer called the "Book of Divine Worship."

Mount Calvary Episcopal Church, founded in 1842, is located in the heart of the city of Baltimore. On their website they describe themselves as a parish that has "borne faithful witness to the essential truth of Catholic Christianity and the tradition of the Oxford Movement for over 150 years, and remains to this day a bulwark of orthodox Anglo-Catholic practice.

[The Oxford Movement was a movement in the early 1800's of "high church Anglicans" who were desiring to maintain faithfulness to essential Catholic teachings. One of the early principle proponents of the Oxford Movement was John Henry Newman, who, as a Catholic convert, received the red hat as a Cardinal. He was recently beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to England.]

"From its foundation, Mt. Calvary has 'contended for the faith once delivered to all the saints,"'the Catholic and Apostolic faith grounded in Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Fathers and Councils of the undivided Church."

The church will come together for a special meeting on October 24th to vote on the vestry's resolutions.

The process which brought the whole parish to this historic moment began with a Vestry retreat in October 2007 where it was decided unanimously that Mount Calvary should explore the possibility of becoming part of the Roman Catholic Church.

Since then the All Saints Sisters of the Poor were received into the Catholic Church and Anglicanorum coetibus was prmulgated.

Another belated post. But it will have to be this way. In choosing to focus on seeking out news and commentary related primarily to Benedict XVI, I am consciously setting aide other Church-related news that are not 'headline' material until I have time to post them, if only for the record.


Spanish archbishop will lead
visitation of Legionaries' lay movement
By Carol Glatz



VATICAN CITY, Sept. 30 (CNS) -- A Spanish archbishop, who was part of the Vatican-led investigation of the Legionaries of Christ, will be the apostolic visitor of the congregation's lay movement, Regnum Christi.

Archbishop Ricardo Blazquez of Valladolid, Spain, is one of a number of appointees named recently to help the papal delegate, Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, in his task of governing the Legionaries and helping reform the order.

The four advisers who will help Archbishop De Paolis are Bishop Brian Farrell, a member of the Legionaries himself, and secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; along with three canon lawyers: Jesuit Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, Sacred Heart Father Agostino Montan, and Msgr. Mario Marchesi, according to earlier media reports.

The Vatican confirmed the list of appointees to Catholic News Service Sept. 30.

The papal delegate, Italian Archbishop De Paolis, has broad powers of authority over the Legionaries of Christ as part of a major Vatican-led reform of the order.

Archbishop De Paolis will lead a commission in charge of revising the order's constitutions, and all members of the order have been encouraged to take an active part in the reform.

The role the advisers will play is flexible. According to the Vatican decree published in July detailing the papal delegate's role, "the delegate will have four personal advisers to aid him in carrying out his work, according to the circumstances and possibilities. These aides may be assigned specific tasks, particularly visits 'ad referendum.' With their help, the papal delegate will identify, discuss, and clarify the principal topics as they arise during the process he is called to lead."

Archbishop De Paolis, who will coordinate the visitation of the Legionaries' Regnum Christi movement, was in charge of naming the movement's visitor, Archbishop Blazquez.

Archbishop Blazquez, 68, served as president of the Spanish bishops' conference from 2005 to 2008 and headed the bishops' commission for the doctrine of the faith from 1993 to 2003.

The former professor of theology was one of five bishops appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 to conduct a visitation of the Legionaries of Christ. He led the investigation of the congregation's centers and institutions in Europe, excluding Italy.

Among the four advisers to Archbishop DePaolis is Bishop Farrell, 66, who was born in Dublin, and was ordained a priest for the Legionaries in 1969. He served from 1970 to 1976 as director of the Legionaries' U.S. novitiate in Orange, Conn.

Italian Msgr. Marchesi is the vicar-general of the Diocese of Cremona and has taught canon law at the Legionaries' Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University in Rome.

Father Montan, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is episcopal vicar of the Rome Diocese's office for consecrated life and a professor of canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.

Father Ghirlanda is a canon lawyer and the former rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University.

The papal delegate and his four advisers have had the chance to work together before in their roles as advisers to several important Vatican agencies.

Archbishop De Paolis, Father Ghirlanda and Father Montan are consultors to the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

Msgr. Marchesi and Fathers Ghirlanda and Montan serve as consultors to the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

Archbishop De Paolis and Father Ghirlanda also are members of the Vatican's Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature and the Pontifical Council Legislative for Texts.

The Vatican-led investigation into the Legionaries and Regnum Christi came in the wake of revelations that the Legionaries' founder, the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, had fathered children and sexually abused seminarians.

His "most grave and objectively immoral conduct" called for "a path of profound revision" in the order, the Vatican said. Father Maciel's "true crimes" reflected "a life devoid of scruples and of authentic religious sentiment," it said.

Issue of October 2010


George Weigel, author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (HarperCollins, 1999), has just published another volume on the same subject, The End and the Beginning (Doubleday, 2010). He recently spoke to CWR about it.



Your biography of Pope John Paul II brought the account of his life and ministry to the threshold of the third Christian millennium. Does your new book contain evidence that the late Pontiff’s hopes for a New Evangelization are being fulfilled in the 21st century?
In The End and the Beginning, I offer a comprehensive analysis of the accomplishments of the pontificate of John Paul II, including his efforts to define, promote, and advance the New Evangelization.

I think you can see positive results of those efforts on many fronts: in renewal movements and new Catholic communities; among seminarians and religious in formation today, and among younger priests and religious; in a new generation of Catholic intellectuals; in the vitality of our best parishes, and in the extraordinary number of people who are baptized or enter into full communion with the Church every year; in those bishops who have discovered a “John Paul II voice” and are taking the Church’s proposal forcefully into the public square.

Of course, I’m speaking largely of the United States here; the New Evangelization hasn’t gotten much traction yet in “Old Europe.”

In 2002 stories about the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy received massive media coverage in the United States. Although most of the incidents were decades old, the scandal raised serious questions about Church governance. During his long pontificate, could John Paul II have done more to address the root causes of such clerical abuse?
As I hope I showed in Witness to Hope, and as I made a special effort to show in The End and the Beginning, John Paul II was a great reformer of the priesthood, a point completely ignored by the mainstream media and largely ignored by the Catholic media. .

He was, as Cardinal William Baum once put it, the “greatest vocations director in history,” and the kind of men he attracted to the demands of the Catholic priesthood through the power of his own example are men who will carry out his reform far into the future — and are very, very unlikely to be abusers of anyone.

No one who reads [his post-synodal apostolic exhortation] Pastores Dabo Vobis or understands the effect it was already having on American seminaries in the 1990s can doubt that the reform of the priesthood in the United States was well underway years before the Long Lent of 2002. [But what percentage of US seminaries have been teaching orthodox Catholicism in the past 30 years? Orthodox Catholic education produces orthodox Catholic priests. Heterodox post-Vatican II teachers, curricula and reading material won't.]

That this was not the case in, say, Ireland, is also true, but the fault there, as in many other circumstances where clerical corruptions have come to light, is primarily to be laid to the account of local bishops who were incompetent, malfeasant, or willfully obtuse.

In your opinion, are the bishops appointed by John Paul II and a generation of priests who were trained during his pontificate helping to resolve the post-conciliar crisis in the Catholic Church?
Frankly, I’m more confident about the priests than about the bishops, although there are many good bishops who are modeling their episcopal ministry after that of Karol Wojtyla.

But one has to give John Paul (as with any pope) mixed marks on the appointment of bishops. He did the best he could, I think, with the process as it has evolved. But it’s the process that needs to be re-examined, particularly in terms of the criteria used by the nuncios and the Congregation for Bishops to identify and assess potential candidates for the episcopate.

The new criteria I outlined in 2002 in The Courage To Be Catholic, which centered on a man’s evangelical effectiveness, still seem to me the appropriate ones.

I’m a bit more sanguine about the John Paul II generation of priests, for the reasons I mentioned a moment ago. But where we can see genuine change, powerfully influenced by the late Pope, in “resolving the post-conciliar crisis,” is in theology. The silly season is over; you'd never know it by reading the program of the Catholic Theological Society of America, of course, but that sad fact is a reflection of the archaic tenure system. [Which will continue to be taught in seminaries and 'Catholic' institutions for as long as CTSA-type theologians continue to teach.]

A younger generation of theologians is being formed in the magisterium of John Paul II and in light of that magisterium’s determination to put the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition into vigorous conversation with the claims of late modernity. The days of pre-emptive surrender to the culture are over, even if they haven’t figured that out in certain theology departments yet.

In Witness to Hope you mentioned that the founder of the Legionaries of Christ was instrumental in obtaining permission for the Pope to visit anti-clerical Mexico in 1979. John Paul II became a great supporter of that congregation and declined to investigate credible accusations against Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado. Has that omission become an obstacle to the process of beatification for the late Pope?
The obstacles to a full investigation of the charges against Maciel did not come, to my knowledge, from the papal apartment. As I state in The End and the Beginning, John Paul II was clearly deceived by Maciel, as were many, many other people, including many other very smart people. But that deception did not involve, to my knowledge, venality or willful ignorance on John Paul II’s part. So the fact that John Paul II was deceived by Maciel does not bear on the question of his heroic virtue.

Did Pope John Paul II succeed in internationalizing the Roman Curia? What effect did those efforts have on the governance of the Universal Church?
He was successful in internationalizing the Curia during his most vigorous years, but in the last half-decade of his life the Curia became increasingly Italianate, both in terms of personnel and style, largely, I think, because of the influence of Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

The real problem with the Roman Curia is its present structure, and a future Pope will have to address that. John Paul II tried to complete the curial reforms of Paul VI, but a more thoroughgoing look at the whole post-conciliar structure of the Curia is imperative in the next pontificate.

Perhaps most strikingly, John Paul II (with the aid of Joaquin Navarro-Valls) reformed and professionalized the Vatican Press Office, which was an enormous help in getting the Pope’s message out, despite the usual difficulties posed by an often-uncomprehending media. Alas, this pattern did not hold into the present pontificate, which has suffered badly from a well-meaning, but truly inept, communications apparatus.

Karol Wojtyla was a professor at a Catholic university for more than 20 years. How has his theology of the body affected Catholic teaching on human sexuality and marriage? Why is it that his apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, has been so widely ignored, especially in the United States?
The theology of the body has had a marked effect on both intellectual and pastoral life throughout the United States, and will continue to do so as a new generation of scholars, clergy, and pastoral counselors “translate” this often-dense and challenging material into a language appropriate for marriage preparation, catechesis, preaching, etc.

I don’t agree that Ex Corde Ecclesiae has been ignored. It has been and continues to be debated vigorously. The mandatum is being sought by faculty in unexpected places. And the places that ignore Ex Corde Ecclesiae have clearly branded themselves as less-than-fully Catholic, if their boards of directors, alumni, and local bishops would please take notice.

Please explain the Pope’s reasons for establishing World Youth Day in 1984. Do you think that this movement will continue to inspire young people during future pontificates?
Karol Wojtyla did not buy the notion, widespread among the world episcopate, that the Church’s evangelical and moral proposal was of no interest to modern and post-modern young people, a judgment based on his own extensive experience in ministry to the young and university chaplaincy work.

So he decided to test that conviction by creating World Youth Days, which were successful beyond anyone’s imagining — except, perhaps, his. I think these events have now established themselves as part of the regular rhythm of global Catholic life, and I expect them to continue.

World Youth Day 2011, in Madrid, will be an important test of whether there can be effective pushback against the increasingly aggressive secularist atmosphere of Europe.

Did the “Pilgrim Pope” cover any new ground in his international pastoral visits in the 21st century?
The most significant ground he covered was the old ground of the Holy Land, where his epic pilgrimage during the Great Jubilee of 2000 left an indelible impress on Catholic-Jewish relations. Of his 21st-century pilgrimages, I would also cite as particularly important his pilgrimage to Ukraine (where he spoke of Ukraine’s “European vocation”), and his forays into historically Islamic and Orthodox lands.

In human terms, his 2004 pilgrimage to Lourdes, where he memorably described himself as a “sick man among the sick,” will live long in many memories as a witness to the inviolable dignity of human life in every and any condition.

In your opinion, which of the 14 encyclicals by Pope John Paul II has or have been the most influential? Would you answer that question differently from a non-Western perspective?
From a non-Western perspective, Redemptoris Missio, with its frank recognition of the general failure of Christian mission in Asia in the first two millennia, and its commitment to take up that task with greater vigor in the third millennium, probably looms largest.

When China finally opens itself fully to the outside world, it will become the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the Western hemisphere in the 16th century. Redemptoris Missio may then be seen as having prepared the way.

In the West, I would name Redemptor Hominis (for its Christian anthropology), Veritatis Splendor (for its reclamation of moral theology), Centesimus Annus and Evangelium Vitae (for their analysis of the requisites of the free and virtuous society), and Fides et Ratio (for its challenge to the idiocies of post-modernism) as among the encyclicals with real influence, now and likely in the future. But the entire corpus of John Paul’s magisterium is important, and will be debated and pondered in the Church and in the world for centuries.

When he was debilitated by illness and old age, did John Paul II ever seriously consider resignation?
I discuss this at length in The End and the Beginning. The short answer is “No,” not in the sense that the media meant “resignation.” There were, as there were during the pontificate of Paul VI, discussions among senior churchmen about how to handle the case of an incapacitated or otherwise impeded the Pope.

Can you tell CWR readers something about the process for the beatification of John Paul II? Is a miraculous cure attributed to his intercession being investigated?
There are numerous miraculous cures, attributed to John Paul II, under investigation. The most touching thing I discovered in the postulator’s office was the fact that letters arrive there from all over the world, simply addressed to “Pope John Paul II, Heaven.” That tells us something about the popular judgment on the man and his heroic virtue.

The Polish Pope, the first non-Italian in centuries, was succeeded by another from Europe, a Bavarian. Could the next conclave elect a cardinal from some other continent?
The conclave can, of course, do anything it wishes or deems to be the will of the Holy Spirit. In practical terms, I would be surprised if the next Pope was from the Third World, but then, I’ve been surprised before.


Michael J. Miller translated The Legacy of John Paul II: Images and Memories for Ignatius Press. This article appears in the October 2010 issue of CWR.


Re Weigel's point about John Paul II as a great reformer of the priesthood, at least in the United States, I believe his effect was largely though his personal example and Christian witness, and not through any changes in the kind of formation that was being provided and continues to be provided in seminaries that espoused 'spirit of Vatican II' Catholicism as soon as they could, declaring this emblematically by discarding Latin from the curriculum....

Unfortunately, such heterodox seminaries cannot be renewed overnight because mass replacement of teachers is not possible. That may explain why Benedict XVI has been consistently pushing his pastoral solicitude and exhortations for priests, seminarians and bishops every chance he gets, because reforming the seminaries is a generational task. Perhaps he should have declared a Decade for Priests rather than just a year because there is so much to be undone.

This is a another gem from my favorite American bishop, and I apologize for posting it so late, especially since he expresses so well all my continuing frustrations and objections to MSM reporting. I do not know who make up the organization that he addressed, but I would like to know if they have any responses at all. Because he skewers journalistic irresponsibility so masterfully and kindly without blunting his points in any way...

Religion, journalism, and
the 'New American Orthodoxy'
by Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Denver

September 24, 2010


In an address delivered before the Religion Newswriters Association, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver commended America’s journalists of religion and challenged them to approach their important work with integrity, fairness, and humility.

---

It’s good to be with you today. Of course, most speakers say that, but I actually mean it — for two reasons. First, I’ve been a heavy reader all my life. A lot of my reading has been, and still is, newspapers and news magazines, although now I mainly read them on my Kindle. And second, I love my country. I think there’s something wrong with a man unless, somewhere in his heart, he really loves his homeland — its people, its beauties, and its best ideals and institutions.

A free press is part of the American identity, and also one of its best institutions. I respect that. I value what journalists do for the same reason I value the importance of religious faith in American life — both in the private home and in the public square.

A responsible press and a faith shaped by the God of charity and justice share two things in common: a concern for human dignity, and an interest in truth.

We might define that word “truth” differently, and the differences might be serious. But an honest search for it creates a kind of maturity. And that maturity allows us to make a decent future through our choices here and now.

Freedom means that our choices matter. It also means that our mistakes have consequences. That’s why lots of people really prefer unfreedom. What many people really want is a rescue from the burden of personal responsibility. They want deliverance from the drudgery of thinking critically about themselves, their mortality, their world, and the purpose of their lives. We all struggle with these temptations.

Americans as a people are no exception. So I can imagine an America without a free press. And I can imagine an America with much less religious freedom. But in either case, it would be a worse America and a disappointment to the generations that built it.

The kind of journalism that tracks our religious life is so important because journalism is the profession where two of our defining freedoms meet.

The very best religion journalists — I know a few of them personally - aren’t “normal” people. They’re amphibians. They live in two very different worlds, and at their best, they can understand and honor the dignity of both. That’s hard work. It takes patience and intelligence. Not many people can do it well. But those who do enrich the common good.

Most of you in this audience have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm at some point. It’s a modern classic. But he had a very hard time getting it published. The reason why is interesting.

Orwell, you’ll recall, was a man of the left. He was also no friend of organized religion, especially the Catholic kind. He was also a veteran of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. While fighting in Spain, where he was nearly killed himself, he saw the duplicity and brutality of the Soviet secret service, which spent more time murdering its Spanish allies on the left than it did fighting fascism.

By the time he finished writing Animal Farm in 1943, Britain had joined with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Orwell couldn’t find a single publisher honest enough to release his allegory of the Soviet regime, in which the main characters were a breed of shrewdly cynical pigs.

Editors said his book would be “inopportune.” When it finally appeared in 1945 near the end of the war, Orwell tried to add a preface titled, “The Freedom of the Press.” The essay didn’t make it into print. It remained unknown for more than 20 years after his death. Scholars found the typescript among Orwell’s papers.

Six decades later, this essay still has value. And here’s why: Most arguments for press freedom deal with the media’s need for independence from state censorship and propaganda. That makes sense. But Orwell focused on something very different — kind of undermining of free thought and expression unique to modern democratic societies.

He saw his problems with Animal Farm as part of a much bigger pattern of “self-censorship” in wartime England. Nobody demanded the media’s fawning coverage of the Soviet Union. Nobody required the falsification of facts, or the ugly attacks on critics of Stalin, or the covering-up of unpleasant truths. Nobody forced journalists and editors to do these things. They freely chose to do them.

The news media of the day were staffed by decent men and women. They felt they were on the side of social progress. They thought the Soviet Union, whatever its flaws, was fighting for human progress too. So they ignored unhappy details and hard questions about the reality of Soviet life.

Their assumptions created what Orwell saw as a new form of religious orthodoxy. That orthodoxy shaped the boundaries of permissible thought and expression. And Orwell warned that this unspoken tendency toward group-think would threaten the press in democratic societies well into the future. He wrote:

At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it . . . [And] anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.

A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, whether in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

I think Orwell’s words capture the way many people feel today toward the news media and coverage of religion news. In practice — at least in the eyes of ordinary people I hear from every week — a new body of ideas seems to shape the limits of acceptable thought in American public life.

This new orthodoxy seems to influence the selection of religious news and how that news gets presented. It seems to frame which opinions are appropriate and which ones won’t be heard. And it seems to guide the historical narrative that media present to their audiences.

At its core, it has a set of assumptions about the nature of human life, the purpose of government, and the proper role of religion in the lives of individuals and in society that veers away from past American habits of thought.

This new thinking seems to presume a society much more secular and much less religious than anything in America’s past or anything warranted by present facts; a society where people are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they don’t intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on government, the economy, or culture.

Whether these ideas really dominate today in American newsrooms is debatable. I think they’re more common than journalists want to admit. I do know reporters and editors whom I admire, and whose fairness and skill I commend. But I think the deficiencies in today’s coverage of religion are too real to ignore. And they’re not simply issues of deadlines and resources. They’re also attitudinal, even ideological. [Well, the bishop has to be diplomatic with his audience. But their reporting is not what it is because of deadlines and lack of resources! It's entirely attitudinal and ideological. And the attitude is primarily that of complete unconcern and disregard for what were once the inviolable standards of the profession of journalism - on the expedient principle that any means, even shoddy and sleazy ones, justify ideological ends.]

One of the worst habits many Catholics had at the start of the clergy sex abuse crisis, including many bishops, was to minimize a very grave problem. But news media show many of the same patterns of denial, vanity, obstinacy, and institutional defensiveness in dealing with criticism of their own failures.

Some of the best proof of the problems I’m talking about is published every day by the journalists at getreligion.org. We now commonly see religion coverage that’s illiterate about the subject matter, or narrows the scope of facts or sources to fit an unfriendly narrative—especially when it comes to the Christian faith and its traditional content. Coverage of Islam tends to be equally ill-informed and confused on matters of history; but also more respectful and even sympathetic, as in the recent New York mosque controversy.

In contrast, the Christian story now told in mainstream media often seems to be a narrative of decline or fundamentalism, or houses divided against themselves along predictable lines of sex and authority. It’s a narrative of institutions and individuals that —insofar as they stay true to their historic beliefs — act as a backward social force and a menace to the liberty of their fellow citizens.

Freedom of the press clearly includes the right to question the actions and motives of religious figures and institutions. Our constitutional safeguards for the press developed partly in response to efforts by Puritans like Cotton Mather to have editors and publishers tossed into jail for satirizing local pastors and mocking Christian beliefs in their pages.

But freedom doesn’t excuse prejudice or poor handling of serious material, especially people’s religious convictions. What’s new today is the seeming collusion - or at least an active sympathy — between some media organizations and journalists, and political and sexual agendas hostile to traditional Christian beliefs. When this happens, the results are bad for everybody.

It’s no accident that freedom of religion and freedom of the press are both named — in that order — in the First Amendment. The country’s founders believed that protecting these two freedoms would be vital to the American experiment. They saw that a self-governing people needs truthful information and sensible opinion from sources other than the state. They also believed that morality grounded in religious belief is fundamental to forming virtuous people able to govern themselves.

These beliefs about American liberty were once widely shared by media professionals. In the mid-19th century, one might often find anti-Catholic sentiment on the editorial pages of America’s major papers — just as we do today. But it served a Protestant consensus. Newspapers attacked “Popish” infiltration, the better to push Protestant goals like prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

The question back then was not whether religion had a place in our public life. Most newspapers assumed, along with most of the cultural establishment, that religious faith and the role of believers were vital to shaping public morality, laws, and policies.

The importance of religion for America’s civic life was never at issue. The rights of religious believers, their leaders, and their communities to preach, teach, organize, and engage society and its political issues were also never at issue. The only issue was whether Catholics should fully enjoy those same rights.

Of course, 2010 is not 1850. A lot has changed. More change is coming. Both Barna Group and Pew Research Center data show two key qualities to our religious landscape today.

First, Americans remain a broadly Christian people. Somewhere between 75 percent and 80 percent of us self-identify as Christian. And Americans continue to have a very high rate of religious practice compared to other developed nations.

Second, old religious loyalties are softening. The percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation has doubled since 1990. For young adults age 18-29, a quarter of them are unaffiliated. And their view of Christianity is more negative than any previously recorded generation at the same age.

This is interesting information. But it’s probably more interesting to our knowledge classes than it is to the ordinary people who get lumped into these social trends.

My point is that we need to understand and use social data. But we also need to be skeptical about them. They don’t predict or determine anyone’s future. The late media scholar Neil Postman liked to argue that social science isn’t really “science” at all, but a disguised form of moral theology.

There is a measure of cultural self-delusion in the prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and other moral theologians are doing something different from storytelling. The New York Times could help if it stopped reporting their work on its Science page. It could help even more if it added a Moral Theology page to which ‘social scientists’ of every variety (including economists) could regularly contribute.

Many factors explain our current religious landscape. But four strike me as most useful.

First, more of our immigration now comes from non-Christian cultures than at any time in the past.

Second, economic, scientific, and technological changes have shaken up our traditional patterns of thinking and learning. They’ve also changed our understanding of the world and of ourselves. In the process, they’ve diminished the place of religion.

Third, Christians have done a terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own children and to the culture at large. The reasons for that would need another discussion on another day.

But in general, I think too much of American Christianity is habit and inheritance. And too little of it is personal conviction and witness— within the family.

By the way, for me, the argument that the so-called “religious right” alienated a generation of young people with its activism seems flatly wrong. And it would have little merit even if it were true, since the mass media play a huge role not just in informing the public but also in shaping opinion — including opinion about religion.

Religion has always played a big role in American public life. The religious right comes from the same soil as the religious left did in its civil rights and peace movement forms. The content is different. The roots are much the same.

I know that from personal experience, because I worked on both the Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Carter campaigns as a young Capuchin. My own thinking as a young priest was heavily influenced by groups on the religious left like Pax Christi.

This brings me to my fourth and last factor in thinking about our religious trends. Some of you, I’m sure, have read Christian Smith’s collection of essays The Secular Revolution. The book has two key themes.

First, American public life went through a massive secularization between 1870 and 1930, and the process continues today. Second, the process wasn’t an accident. Secularization didn’t happen naturally. It wasn’t the inevitable result of “progress.”

Secularization took place in large measure — as Smith and his fellow scholars prove in great detail - because academics, educators, journalists, economists, and scientists consciously attacked and overthrew America’s Protestant establishment.

[I agree with all that, except for the target of the attacks, if by 'Protestant establishment' is meant the emblematic WASP - white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. That is to say, what they attacked and continue to attack is not so much that 'establishment' as a political or cultural bloc, but specifically, the Christian values that they affirm, since they contradict the secular thrust of all so-called 'progressive' thought. In which 'progressive' is code for radical, ultra-liberal, inherently Godless causes such as Obama and his acolytes are trying to impose now! In fact, perhaps the underlying drive for so many white liberals' (the WASS, white Anglo-Saxon seculars) manic and totally uncritical support for Obama whatever he says or does is that, as a black man, even if he is half-white, he is their ideal weapon against the WASP, the ultimate putdown of the WASP, if you will.]

In the words of Smith,

---

[This] rebel insurgency consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located in knowledge-production occupations; and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism, and the privatization or extinction of religion.

---

As Smith and his colleagues show, knowledge professionals have their own kind of orthodoxy. They place a high premium on their own skill and autonomy. This has consequences. It predisposes them to be uncomfortable with, and even hostile toward, any claims of revealed truth, religious institutions, traditions, doctrines, and authority.

These are strong statements, but history supports them. Obviously, exceptions do exist. Many people in the knowledge occupations do believe in God. Many practice a religious tradition. The Catholic Church, after all, has one of the longest and greatest intellectual traditions in human history.

The point I want to leave you with is this:

Journalism is a “knowledge profession.” But like any other profession, the work of journalism doesn’t necessarily translate into self-knowledge or self-criticism. And any lasting service to the common good demands both.

Journalism has its own unstated orthodoxies. It has its own prejudices. And when they go unacknowledged and uncorrected - they too often seem to do - they can diminish our public life.

Religion journalism deals with the most fundamental things about human meaning, things intimate, defining, and sacred to many millions of people. So -
- Master and respect your material.
- Know yourself and your prejudices.
- Acknowledge mistakes, and don’t make them a habit.
- Be as honest with yourself as you want your sources to be.
- Understand believers and their institutions as they understand themselves.

And if you do that — and do it with integrity, fairness, and humility —then you’ll have the gratitude of the people you cover, and you’ll embody the best ideals of your profession.G]

Many thanks.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/10/2010 21:52]

Head of Vatican 'Academy for Life'
criticizes Nobel prize winner for
unwanted consequences of IVF
by Nicole Winfield



VATICAN CITY, Oct. 4 (AP) – The Vatican's top bioethics official said Robert Edwards, who received the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for developing in vitro fertilization, opened "a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction" but is also responsible for the destruction of embryos and the creation of a "market" in donor eggs.

Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the newly appointed head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said awarding the Nobel to Edwards is "not completely out of place." But he said it raised a great number of questions, not least because his research didn't treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it.

Edwards, an 85-year-old Briton who is professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, won the prestigious award on Monday. The Nobel medicine prize committee said some 4 million people have been born through IVF.

The Vatican is opposed to IVF because it involves separating conception from the "conjugal act" — sexual intercourse between a husband and wife — and often results in the destruction of embryos. Church teaching holds that human life begins at conception, and must be given the consequent respect and dignity from that moment on.

In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, Carrasco nevertheless said Edwards "is not a figure to be under-estimated."

"He has inaugurated a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction, whose best results are evident to all," he said citing Louise Brown — the first baby to be born through IVF, in 1978. Carrasco noted the woman, now 32, is herself the mother of a naturally conceived baby.

Still, he said, "without Edwards there wouldn't be a market of eggs.
Without Edwards, there wouldn't be freezers full of embryos waiting to be transferred in utero or, more likely, be used for research or to die, abandoned and forgotten by all," Carrasco said.

Carrasco stressed that he was offering a personal opinion, not a Vatican statement.

He was appointed in June to head the Vatican's pro-life academy, an advisory office composed of Catholic doctors, bioethicists, clergy and others who advise the Pope on such hot-button and emotionally-charged issues as abortion, the right to die and assisted procreation.

In his statement to the AP, Carrasco blamed Edwards for the "current state of confusion of assisted procreation: children with four or five parents, babies born from their grandmothers."

"Edwards built a house but opened the wrong door," Carrasco said. IVF paved the way for "donations and sales involving human beings" and Edwards did not address the pathology of infertility.

Carrasco said the solution to the problem of infertility lies elsewhere and called for patience in research.


Mons. Carrasco is to be commended for his prompt and thoughtful reaction to Dr. Edwards's Nobel Prize, and for making it clear that he is expressing his personal opinion, not that of 'the Vatican' (a qualification not usually made by other Curia members whose often controversial statements end up being attributed flatly to 'the Vatican', as though they were from the Magisterium of the Church.]

And AP must likewise be commended for presenting this story without apparent bias. Even if the resulting headlines catalogued on online news summaries about the Papacy and the Vatican seek to portray Mons. Carrasco's statement as if it were a reflexive, hysterical anti-science reaction rather than the well-considered and balanced opinion that it is.

Cardinal Schönborn lauds
alleged Medjugorje seers

October 05, 2010


Cardinal Christoph Schönborn lauded alleged Medjugorje seers Ivan Dragicevic and Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti as he welcomed them to St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on September 23, according to an English translation of his remarks recently posted on YouTube.

“Thank you for your service across so many years, for your work, for your service of being messengers of the Gospa [Our Lady],” the cardinal said. “You give us, you bring us children of this world, children of humanity, her love and her presence, and may God pay you back a hundredfold for what you are doing tirelessly.”


So Schoenborn did go ahead to proclaim, in effect, his own Magisterium about Medjugorje! Not even the courtesy of waiting till thr Pope's Medijugorje inquiry commission does its job! What was so urgent about placing his own stamp of approval on the purported seers? Isn't this an 'IN YOUR FACE' and almost raising his third finger to the Pope????

by Clare Rawlinson and James Madden: The Australian October 07, 2010

THE priest who spent 25 years lobbying for Mary MacKillop's canonisation has angrily dismissed recent media reports.

The reports said the soon-to-be saint was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for exposing acts of child sex abuse by a South Australian clergyman.

Paul Gardiner, chaplain of the Mary MacKillop Penola Centre, said the claims, published on ABC Online and in Fairfax newspapers last month, were false, and he feared the misleading coverage was an attempt to take a swipe at the church and distract the public in the lead-up to MacKillop's canonisation on October 17.

ABC Online and Fairfax both reported that MacKillop's ousting from the church in 1871 was prompted by her exposure of a Kapunda priest's abuse of local children. The claims were based on remarks made by Father Gardiner in a documentary made for ABC TV's Compass program.

But both Father Gardiner and the program's executive producer deny ever making such an inference. "Early in 1870, the scandal occurred and the Sisters of Saint Joseph reported it to Father Tenison Woods, but Mary was in Queensland and no one was worried about her," Father Gardiner told The Australian.

Father Gardiner, considered the nation's foremost authority on the history of MacKillop, said his words had been twisted to suit the "ill will" of media outlets.

"There was a long chain of causation. Somehow or other, somebody typed it up as if to say I said Mary MacKillop was the one to report the sex abuse," Father Gardiner said.

"I never said it - it's just false - it's the ill will of people who are anxious to see something negative about the Catholic Church. There's already enough mud to throw, though."

The executive producer of Compass, Rose Hesp, told The Australian that the documentary, which will air on the ABC on Sunday, does not suggest MacKillop was excommunicated because of her role in exposure of the child abuse.

"At no stage . . . is it claimed Mary MacKillop was excommunicated because she personally reported instances of abuse to the Catholic Church," she said.

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/priest-denies-making-claims-about-mackillops-excommunication/story-e6frg6nf-12259...