BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

The following was a strange headline to find in the London Times online, especially with Ruth Gledhill's byline. But one must thank Gledhill for having the journalistic good sense to give over her blog today to a conservative Catholic blogger, Chris Gillibrand of Catholic Conservation.

Gillibrand gives one of the best layman's presentations so far of the status ecclesiam two years since Summorum Pontificum which also answers the now infamous gloating - and unfairly misrepresentative - editorial by the ultra-liberal British Catholic magazine The Tablet [as odious to orthodox Catholics as National Catholic Reporter in the US is) - which deliberately cherry-picks a recent letter by the new Archbishop of Westminster to make it appear that he is hostile to Summorum Pontificum.



Benedict XVI brings order
out of 'liturgical chaos'
From the blog
by RUTH GLEDHILL

August 12, 2009



Recently, as Christopher Lamb reported for The Tablet, the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols warned traditionalists that if they denigrate the ordinary form of the Mass, they risk alienating themselves from the Roman Catholic Church.

His message was sent to the Latin Mass Society as it prepares for the latest in its increasingly successful series of conferences to train priests in how to celebrate correctly the Tridentine Rite, or the usus antiquior as they refer to it. [Archbishop Nichols's complete letter is available online.]

The warning won him warm praise from The Tablet: 'Thus has Archbishop Nichols neatly answered virtually every objection to the motu proprio, and the Tridentine Rite can henceforth take its proper – and necessarily marginal – place in the life of the Catholic Church.'

The leader in The Tablet, the leading journal to speak for, and to, mainstream British Catholics [Then that's a mainstream I would steer clear from! and God help the British] continues: 'Indeed, he has made it accessible to those who are fully committed to Vatican II. This timely display of clear leadership from the new president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales bodes well.'

...I am perhaps not always the best qualified to comment on the more arcane matters of 'old' Catholic liturgy. So I have invited CathCon's Chris Gillibrand to write a response, confident of his extraordinary expertise and understanding in these matters. Chris writes:

---

'Within the household of the Catholic Faith, only a liberal Catholic newspaper could regard as controversial the words and intention in the Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, issued the Vicar of Christ on earth, Pope Benedict XVI. The document provides freedom to the Latin Mass.

One has to be amused also by the Tablet praising the firm hand (as they perceive it) of ecclesiastical authority from Archbishop Nichols. Hopefully, their friends on the left will be as submissive to Episcopal authority as they wish their enemies on the right to be.

The impression is often given that the traditionalists are the last group of faithful over which the bishops have any influence. And let us be clear, the Motu Proprio does not “appear” to allow priests to opt for the Latin Mass, it does.

Bishops have been as ingenious in frustrating the will of the Pope, as the Tablet would wish them to be - Bishops’ Conferences which have no juridical status issuing guidelines for its implementation.

The need for a stable group was interpreted by one German bishop as requiring the studying of identity cards before the Mass to make sure everyone came from the immediate area!

Much more controversial is the Tablet’s assertion that the new Mass “reflects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council” (attending Mass at the London Oratory and the Catholic Sanctuary by the great traditionalist Catholic author Michael Davies will soon correct this view) - NO! Rather this Mass [the Novus Ordo] is a reflection of the committee decisions that constructed it in the post-conciliar era.

This is the first approved liturgy of the Catholic Church to be so constructed and, God willing, the last. It would, however, be imprecise to call this liturgy a rite in any sense known to history, given the diverse manners of celebration, both in terms of form and content.

A rite needs unity of form, at least. Thousands, upon thousands, of authorised permutations for celebrating Mass exist, which becomes an unknowable number, possibly approaching infinite, when all the variations that exist that have never been authorised are taken into account. These variations are in the hands, at best, of the parish priest, and, at worst, a parochial liturgical committee.

One is reminded of the liturgical chaos prior to the Council of Trent, which ruled that all liturgical uses not older than two hundred years should be suppressed. In our own days, fifty years would suffice.

If we accept the argument that personal preference should play no role in liturgy, it is time to close down every liturgical committee in the land, and produce proper rubrics for the new Mass, so that its dignity of celebration can approach that of the Latin Mass.

Active participation, after the Second Vatican Council, has in effect meant the “active participation” of a pseudo-clerical lay elite in the power structures of parish and diocese.

One only has, as a server, to compare the view of the congregations at an ordinary form and an extraordinary form of the Mass to realise that the Latin Mass wins every time for participation levels - devout following of the Latin Mass in hand Missals, compared to the boredom and alienation on the faces of those who assist at the new Mass.

“Help, I am a Catholic, get me out of here”, they seem to be saying. And this is reflected on the face of the priest, who faces the people in the new Mass.

In contrast, at the Latin Mass the congregation are not spectators of what the priest is doing, or the rest of the congregation but of the divine presence.

I took a learned Methodist friend to Mass once and he was worried about sitting in the front row, because “we’d be seen”. I immediately assured him that the last people that would concern the congregation would be us, rather they would be worshipping Christ in the Blessed Sacrament as they would honour a king.

Indeed, if active participation really has been a fruit of the Council, then there would have been an increased belief among Catholics in the Real Presence of Christ as a result. The reverse has occurred.

Laying aside their devotions to saints, specific aspects of the life and Passion of Jesus and the angels (all so enriched by indulgences), the laity have been told they should now make their Eucharistic life, Christo-centric (as if it was not before).

Whenever anyone demands a Christo-centric liturgy, they really want a self-referential liturgy, either to themselves, or the “gathered community” or both. The Mass text in English (and almost all other languages) has mistranslated the Gospel words of Jesus used in the consecration, “pro multis”, which should be “for many” as “for all”, from which it is but a short step to the sentimental but erroneous belief that each and every one of us is directly destined for heaven: i.e., that what we do in the course of this earthly life is irrelevant and the application of the fruits of the Mass to our eternal destiny is unnecessary.

Is it any wonder that people think that Mass is a waste of time and want to go home?- regularity of practice dropping off, leading to lapsation. More liberal Catholics call the exclusive use of male altar servers discrimination, using secular rather than religious categories.

Given that women cannot and will never be ordained to the priesthood, one should remember that male servers were a great reservoir from which priestly vocations were developed, as the young servers modelled themselves on the glories of the priesthood. Rather today, given that girls mature rather more quickly than boys, the boys are just chased away.

One only has to look at the photographs of the serving teams in parishes, which are even more dominated by females than the European Commission recruitment. It all makes for a good, bourgeois image of Catholic life, but not for vocations. Besides, it is insulting to girl servers to encourage them in the belief that they might one day be priests. They won’t, and often will lapse.

Traditional Catholics are being asked to regard as equivalent the ordinary and extraordinary forms. For the forty years after the Council, the Latin Mass may as well have been invalid given the strict conditions imposed on it, and in book after book, calumnies were heaped on it pointing out its supposed deficiencies.

The most anyone can expect in the circumstances is for traditional Catholics to tolerate the new Mass, now that the Pope has given priests the right (effectively given them back something that they already possess) to celebrate the Latin Mass.

What an odious age we live in when the Catholic Church proposes for liturgical use a Mass which is putatively invalid, either in the intrinsic or extrinsic sense. Invalidity is something that Anglicans luxuriate in, not the inheritance of Catholics.

The Chadwick resignation letter imputes to the members of the Latin Mass Society (which he was meant to be leading) views that they do not hold. The wilder shores (well beyond the LMS) of sede-vacantism (there is no Pope occupying the throne of St Peter) have to be reached before encountering the absolute belief in the invalidity of the new Mass.

The greatest indicator of intrinsic invalidity would be if erroneous belief were to be propagated by the Mass and good candidates for this would not only be the universal salvation referred to earlier but also the idea that the Mass was no longer before everything a sacrifice, identical with that on Calvary save that it is unbloody.

The idea of the Mass as a heavenly banquet comes after that of sacrifice, and it expresses participation in the act. The sacrificial character of the Mass was only saved by the merest whisker in the post-conciliar era - approximating to Protestant forms being considered more important than truth. [Why, oh why, did Paul VI give in to Bugnini et al????]

And extrinsically, while St Thomas Aquinas provided the broadest possible terms for the validity of a Mass (other authorities are stricter), a priest not intending to offer sacrifice would render a Mass invalid and their are plenty of priests who can be suspected of this in Europe.

Is sacrifice intended in this ideal of a Mass for the holidays proposed by the German Bishops Conference? [This refers to an outrageous article with a picture in the German conference site dedicated to the Year for Priests. The article is entitled "In order that dormant areas of (one's) life may breathe again..."

in which a priest writes that the Mass should be adapted for the convenience of people on vacation who really should not be distracted from their vacation. I was going to do a post about it in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread, but I came across the Gledhill blog, so I might as well use it here. The disposable plasticware were meant to be the Mass vessels!

Tthe fact that the German bishops' conference site would publish such an article at all - in its webpage for the YEAR FOR PRIESTS, yet! - is emblematic of how far out, to say the least, the German Church can be. It gives me the shivers! Think what it means to Joseph Ratzinger, priest, German and Pope!]

I used to hold what I now consider to have been a naive view of the equivalence of the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Mass, until I started travelling on the continent. My experiences of the all-embracing liturgical decadence are detailed on my blog for those that are interested.

Ordinary and extraordinary are not equivalent. While many confuse deficiency and invalidity, deficient is definitely the name for the ordinary form.

The validity of the new Mass is saved not by intrinsic considerations (wayward priests beside) but by ecclesiological considerations by which salvation is offered by Christ and His Church to as many souls as possible in this world, as by divine intent: the Catholic Church is the unique vessel of salvation.

So while the ordinary and extraordinary forms of Mass are both valid, no one could sustainably accuse the Latin Mass of being invalid. Both the extraordinary and ordinary forms are liturgies of the Bishop of Rome.

It is now time for the Pope to celebrate the Latin Mass publically to prove the point. [This is a maddening conundrum I have been puzzled about from the very beginning, and I can find no explanation of why Benedict XVI has not yet celebrated it in public as Pope.]

The extraordinary form is the highest expression of human civilisation throughout the ages, whether or not one is a Catholic. It is in the most profound sense the ordinary form - it is extraordinary that what should be the extraordinary form bears the name ordinary and vice versa. Time will surely correct these misnomers.

The Latin Mass is the measure of all Catholic life, the new Mass on the one hand and all the protestant liturgies together, being mere abstractions from it.

The liberation of the Latin Mass by Pope Benedict is reminiscent of the Emperor Constantine permitting liberty of worship throughout the Roman Empire - after which the triumph of Catholicism was inevitable, as the Latin Mass will eventually displace the new Mass. The last barriers to this are the seminarians who studied immediately after the Council.

For them to quote Wordsworth (in his poem about the French Revolution).

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! - Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!"

In place of 'reason', perhaps, we could put 'religion'.

The next generation will take up the Benedictine gift of the Latin Mass without any psychological reservation. The statistics are prophetic. In Germany, the mainstream church which uses the new Mass will be extinct in twenty years given the year on year almost precisely linear decline in the number of Catholics since 1945.

The Second Vatican Council produced the minutest of all possible blips in the statistics - so much for the much vaunted fruits of the Council.

In other countries, where normally the Catholic Church had been going from strength to strength in the post-war years, the mainstream church going down will meet the traditional groups coming up in about fifteen years. Questions of validity of the new Mass will be irrelevan t- the new Mass will be, by that stage, marginalised and increasingly unnecessary to the life of the Church.

The rebirth of the Church will take much more than the Latin Mass, but it is the greatest of all possible beginnings. Inter alia. improved catechetics, renewed Catholic education and a re-establishment of the natural law as the centre of Catholic morals will all be needed besides.

The death of the liberal Catholic project, for which the Tablet has stood for so many years, was announced immediately under the article about the Latin Mass, with the EU sponsoring legislation which seek the submission of the Catholic conscience to the state.

All that openness has brought precisely nothing apart from the prospect of persecution or conformity. The Latin Mass bring the prospect maybe also of persecution but also of glory, and the greater glory which is yet to be revealed. The Pope, Archbishop Nichols and the Latin Mass Society understand the signs.'

---

Note: Ruth Gledhill would like to make it clear that publication of this article by Chris Gillibrand should not be taken to infer that she agrees with all or indeed any of the views he expresses here.


Sorry- I messed up the post 'typographically' this morning - and it's only hours much later (9:30 p.m.) that I have the chance to get back to the forum and discovery my sloppiness.


For the right perspective on this story and how it began, here is the message of Mons. Nichols:

Message from the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols
Archbishop of Westminster

---

I welcome this short Training Conference provided by the Diocese of Westminster in conjunction with the Latin Mass Society. This is the correct description of this event. In both the teaching and law of the Church it is the bishop who has responsibility for the provision and oversight of the Liturgy.

In the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum Pope Benedict permitted the use of the 1962 Form of the Mass, under clearly defined circumstances. In doing so he insisted that there is one Rite of the Mass in the Latin Church. This makes clear that the ordinary Form of the Mass and this extraordinary Form serve one and the same Rite.

They are, therefore, both finding their place in this Summer School and participants will wholeheartedly celebrate the Mass in each of these Forms. The view that the ordinary Form of the Mass, in itself, is in some way deficient finds no place here.

[The deficiencies are in the arbitary free-form ways it has been celebrated, ways that violate the essense of the Mass as a recreation of Christ's sacrifice through prescribed ritual. Rituals are not meant to be subject to infinite variations at the whim and whimsy of those involved!]

Indeed anyone who holds such a view does not come under the generous provision of Summorum Pontificum. Such a person is inexorably distancing themselves from the Church.

The Mass is the source and expression of the unity of the Church, for that unity comes from Christ. We have no other. Our unity does not consist in a uniformity of personal use or preference. Indeed, such matters should play a minimum part in our liturgy, particularly in the ministry of the priest.

What we priests are to provide, as a key element of our ministry, is the Liturgy of the Church.

The established principle of good liturgy – such as the ‘active participation’ of all taking part in the Mass, in both the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist – apply, whichever Form of the Mass is being used.

This principle needs careful consideration and application by every celebrant and any who help in the preparation of the liturgy. I trust it will find its place in this Summer School.

Pope Benedict has given an additional and delicate task to priests and bishops: the provision of the extraordinary Form of the Mass in response to genuine needs as outlined in the Motu Proprio.

I am grateful to you all for helping us to respond to this task, always within the work of sustaining and nurturing the unity of the Church.

+Vincent Nichols

---

I have no words for this picture and the connected caption. Are they insane!? Who would take that Priest serious after such a thing? Who would ever go back??! S C A R Y !!!! It's almost as bad as the famous puppet 'Mass'

Mega explosion! This one is also appropriate:

I can't wait for Archbp. Marx of München and Freising to be elected as head of the DBK. It will be a while until the next election, but who knows, he might be a Cardinal by then.

One thing is for sure. If I had a son who'd be interested in the Priesthood, I'd defintely enroll him at the FSSP seminary - no matter how far away it may be. At least until the post Vatican II kumbajah-clerics have retired!



A full Latin Mass celebrated by our Papa Ratzinger would be a dream come true.

Early this morning, I started translating a couple of articles from the continuing fallout in the Italian media via surprisingly polemical reactions from some Italian Jewish leaders and secular intellectuals disputing the four sentences by the Holy Father in his Angelus discourse last Sunday, in which he spoke about the Nazi death camps and contemporary nihilism.

My bad, I 'lost' the translation that I thought I had posted - an editorial from Il Foglio in its usual sensible and literate manner:


It's legitimate to criticize the Pope's words
but first, read what he actually said
Editorial
Translated from

August 12, 2009


To give Prof. Ratzinger a 'failing grade' in philosophy is an irresistible temptation to his critics, and one which Adriano Sofri, after Emanuele Severino, has not resisted.

In a page 1 editorial commentary for La Repubblica [ultra-liberal, anti-Church and very anti-Benedict XVI), Sofri said the association of Nazi barbarism and nihilism in the papal Angelus message from Castel Gandolfo last Sunday was 'a double error' which "obscured the Nazi horror" [When has Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ever obscured the Nazi horror in any way????] while "denouncing nihilism as evil".

[To begin with, Sofri was a curious choice to do the hatchet job for Repubblica this time. Did the newspaper's self-anointed Pope of everything that is worthy and good and true, founder-editorialist Eugenio Scalfari, think the matter was too 'insignificant' for him to wield the ax himself?

Sofri himself is a curious personage - one who has been accused and convicted, then acquitted, then re-accused and convicted and acquitted all over, of masterminding the assassination of Luigi Calabreis, a Milanese police official [who has since been the object of a beatification cause] in the 1960s, to avenge the police killing of an anarchist bomber. At the time, Sofri was the leader of a semi-anarhical group called Lotta Continua (Continuing Struggle).

He has always maintained his innocence about the assassination of Calabresi, but in an interview with Corriere della Sera last January, he admitted 'moral culpability' for the homicide. While in prison, he started writing for various mainstream Italian publications and over the years, earned a reputation somehow as an intellectual.]

In calling down the Pope, Sofri 'simplifies' the Pope's words, so to speak - very likely, he never read the original, simply news reports about it - so he could more easily criticize the Pope for, in effect, equating death camps and nihilism.

Actually, the Pope never said that "the Nazi death camps (were) extreme symbols of evil just like contemporary nihilism', as Sofri claimed. He never said that nihilism as a philosophical theory or a mental attitude was the 'extreme evil'.

What he did point out was "the hell that opens on earth when man forgets God and substitutes himself, usurping God's right to decide what is good and bad, to give life or death".

He continued, quite clearly without mixing up categories, that "unfortunately, this sad phenomenon is not limited to death camps, which are however the culminating point of an ample and widespread reality, often without fixed boundaries". [I think now that 'with moving boundaries' is a better tramslation.]

In the secular confrontsation between atheist humanist and Christian humanism, Papa Ratzinger sees the accentuation of the antithesis that "at the end of the second millennium, reached a crucial point with contemporary nihilism."

But that is the very description used by the most secular historians of philosophy for the 'emancipation' of contemporary thinking from metaphysics.

So, Sofri's smackdown of the Pope, based on a misreading of what the Pope actually said, is completely baseless.

Of course, it is legitimate to claim that atheist (or at least, non-Christian) humanism will not necessarily end up in nihilism, nor in a desire for power, nor the exaltation of free will.

But it would be wrong to deny the Pope his right to defend - in the context of the historical antithesis that everyone acknowledges - the value of Christian humanism based on love.

If instead of following Benedict XVI's line of reasoning [which is always so linear and direct], he is made to say that non-Christian humanism is authomatically nihilist and that nihilism leads inevitably to death camps, then one is attributing to him, paradoxically, a deterministic attitude which is what he has always firmly fought in his cultural battle against the absurd [because self-contradictory] claim that relativism has absolute value!



The newspaper Liberal actually devoted part of its front page and three pages more on August 12 to a discussion of the criticisms against the Pope, under the rubric, 'Who's afraid of the Pope?" (better expressed in an inside headline as 'The secular fear of the Pope'. Here was the first of four articles:



Those who criticize the Pope
without having the means to do so
by Luca Volonte
Translated from

August 12, 2009


In his encyclicals Deus caritas est and Spe salvi, Benedict XVI wrote at length about the challenges from nihilism and its consequences. But apparently, Adriano Sofri never read them, although he admits explicitly that he is opposing what the philosopher Pope has said with what other philosophers have written or said.

An unlikely fuss has been stirred over words the Pope said before the Angelus last Sunday. After the very first stand-offish comments by philosopher Emanuele Severino, 80 - statements which were far afield from the Pope's words and concerns - the 'usual suspects' at Repubblica played up on Page 1 the rather obvious and banal observations of Mr. Adriano Sofri.

Who finds the opportunity to mark out in red 'the errors of Ratzinger'. Armed with 'authoritativeness' from his years of his extra-parliamentary contacts as a vocal advocate of 'radical chic' pietisms, he calls the Pope 'distracted, 'ordinary', 'a non-specialist', 'rash', 'obscuring the Nazi horror', a 'disengaged show-off', who "obscures the Nazi horror" and whose beliefs lead to "inhibiting the survival of human society even in its most elementary day-to-day relationships".

How's that from someone like Sofri who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian? [Nor particularly qualified otherwise to oppose his ideas credibly to Ratzinger/Benedict XVI!]

On the question of rights without responsibilities, the Pope's critics may read the recent Caritas in veritate. On freedom without responsibilities and the consequences of atheistic humanism, both Severino adn Sofri would benefit from reading at least Henri de Lubac.

Obviously, the Pope's words on these subjects [even if all he did was say the words last Sunday without elaborating on them] must touch live nerves in many people. The Pope's criticsm of the idolatry of freedom without responsibility must have wounded many who have become so comfortably addicted to such freedom and have racted with utterly self-absorbed exasperation.

But what did the Pope say exactly? He recalled the saints that the Church remembers liturgically this week, from St. Lawrence to Clare of Assisi, to Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe. He commented on the latter two to point out that, as martyrs, they testified to God in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz.

Nazi lagers and Communist gulags, the Pope has said on other occasions, are "extreme symbols of evil, of the hell that opens on earth when man forgets God and substitutes himself, usurping the right to decide what is good and bad, to give life or death".

The saints, in particular, the Pope points out, "make us reflect on the differences between atheistic humanism and Christian humanism".

Whoever disagrees with the above, raise your hand, with full recognition of what the subject really is, of its related historical facts, with realism and without nonsensical improbabilities.

The antithesis between the Christian idea of man and that of the atheists has now reached 'a crucial point', precisely because Severino's much-beloved technology now allows man to 'make himself god' with all the consequences of that arrogation.

Absolute freedom places its advocates outside and independent of others and of the Other. It transforms man into 'God' - more properly, into an ape of God whose only trait is the complete arbitrariness of everything he does. And whoever has the greatest strength or power is able to impose his will on others. Read the disquieting theories of atheists like Dawkins, Harris and Onfray.

But perhaps the best advice one can give the know-all critics of the Pope is to reflect on the words of Kirillov in Dostoevsky's "The Demons' just before he commits suicide: "If there is no God, then I am God... Is it possible that there could be anyone in the whole planet who, after having finished with God and having placed all his faith in his own free will, would not detest having to proclaim tbe praises of free will in an absolute sense?"

Well, the Pope has set forth the example of saints enamored with God as an antidote to the suicide of the world, in the face of an obvious preference in the prevailing culture for the euthanasia of the West.


Evil is nihilism:
An interview with Giovanni Reale
by Riccardo Paradisi
Translated from

August 12, 2009


Reale (born 1931) is considered the world's leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, and has been responsible for a modern re-reading and re-interpretation of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine. It is said that he was the philosopher most consulted by John Paul II.


"Many unfortunately do not understand what nihilism is," is the reply of philosopher Giovanni Reale to those who, like Adriano Sofri yesterday on page 1 of La Repubblica, maintain that it was arbitrary on the part of the Pope to trace totalitarian evil do nihilism, and man's self-promotion to being God, to atheism, even if it is 'humanistic'.

"They do not understand nihilism. Those who answer back Joseph Ratzinger with their waterd-down ideas of nihilism have never had to face it. They have not understood the terrible announcement made by Nietszche, nihilism's philosopher par excellence, about the death of God, the transmutation of all values, fidelity to the earth as the only principle of reality".

Giovanni Reale, in his book La saggezza antica [Ancient wisdom), showed analytically that all the evils of mankind today derive precisely from nihilism, the most disquieting guest, in the words of Nietszche himself, nihilism's true and terrible prophet.

"Nihilism," says Reale, "is not just a simple philosophical position - it's a way of thinking, of being, of living, that can assume many forms but whose substance is identical. Well, that substance is 'nothingness'. Many use the nihilist concept in a way that ignores this abysmal essence, in which there is no principle nor objective, there is no truth, there is no meaning. Nihilism is a black hole that sucks up everything. It relativizes and dis-assembles everything that we call human values and principles, mullifying every ontology and every metaphysics."

Nihilism is the death of God, he points out. "But not just the Christian God", he is quick to add, in reply to the Pope's critics who claim there are other kinds of religious humanism other than Christian.

"It's the death of every possible God. Of every possible idea of God, and therefore of every value and every ideal. Camus was a psychologist-metaphysicist of the highest order. And he used to say, 'Even if there is no God, I believe in values'.

"He understood very well the trap of atheism, which he called a fiction, in the sense that if values are not anchored to God, to a truth, to the principle of being, then they are revocable values. And therefore not values. They are artificial constructs that come from nothing and will end up in nothing.

"When I hear young people professing a programmed skepticism, I feel nihilism at work. It takes several forms: minimalism, ideology, 'weak thought' [apparently, this is a ccategory of contemporary thought - is it analogous to the 'weak force' in the unified theory of the cosmos?], relativism, libertinism. All masks. And if you tear off the mask, there is nothing underneath. Nietszche called these the golden masks of nihilism. Sirens who ultimately bring you to the abyss."

"If you nullify all principles but do not delude yourself, then you will realize you have reached a dead end. Without any solid point of reference. If everything is nothing, then all is allowed."

Reale cites Plato: "He understood: freedom is not an absolute value. When it is not acnhored to a truth, it becomes license, arbitrariness. By relativizing truth, arbitrariness opens the door to the demagoguery of sophists and the rule of tyrants. To see the totalitarianisms of the 20th century in this perspective does not absolve them - it is to unmask their hearts of darkness. The origin of their long march to the point when they exploded onto the surface of modernity."

"It had a great effect that the Pope said the Nazi death camps were hell on earth. Hell is the nullifcation of good, absolute arbitrariness paid for by the holocaust of others. A total detachment from truth.

"The devil was an angel who rebelled against God. The man who thinks himself god is his successor. It is the essence of nihilism - not simply to think about nothingness but even to want it.

"Those boys who threw rocks from an overpass onto pedestrians below were a sign of nihilism's influence in the world. That there need be no link between cause and effect. When they were asked why they did it, oen of them answered, 'Because we felt like doing it'.

"Pure animal instinct. In the absence of thought, feeling becomes action. To throw stones at passersby - yesterday, it was a provocation by the elite, today it is a widespread phenomenon.

"The goal of Nazism was to eliminate God from the world and place in teh center the blond beast of prey that Nietszche had forecast".

Realse says it was not just Nazism that created hell in the 20th century that was a century of horrors. Communism did the same thing, he says. It created an objective enemy to be nullified in the gulags, dissidents to be reprogrammed in labor camps or in mental asylums, children who denounced their parents for speaking of God.

Finally, Reale criticized the method of those who dispute Papa Ratzinger: "When a newspaper like Repubblica speaks about religion, it does not seem to understand anything about it. They reduce religion to politics and sociology. To people who make this a practice, I would say with Heidegger, 'If you have not had the least religious experience, then keep your hands off religious matters'. It's like asking a blind man to describe the light or a deaf man to describe music."


Much ado without reason
by Vincenzo Faccioli Pintozzi
Translated from

August 12, 2009


"Good and bad exist in all religions. It is sheer instrumentalization to postulate a correlation between Nazism and Christianity, just as it is unjust not to remember that Benedict XVI has always rightly condemned the horrors of the Shoah".

This is the opinion of David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, speaking out about the polemics that arose from statements made by the Pope before the Angelus prayers last Sunday.

Words which, as the editor of L'Osseevatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, points out, "were not said in a lecture on history, but as a reflection on the saints whom the Church commemorates these days".

Rosen says: "I don't want to comment on the statements made by the Chief Rabbi of Italy (Eugenio Laras, president of the Italian rabbinical assembly) because I am not in my element there, and I don't think it is right to judge or belie a statement made by someone who is.

"Personally, I have no doubt that Benedict XVI is totally committed to continuing, in the best way possible, what began under John Paul II. He has been faithfully following what he inherited. [Rosen, better than anyone, should know that any and all steps that John Paul II took with the Jews since Cardinal Ratzinger came to the Vatican were with the latter's advice and theological backstop!]

"Insofar as the current polemics over the sociology or theology of the Shoah, my answer is simple: it is not for me to comment on the Pope's theology.

"We all need to remember that there were a great many good Christians who - at the risk of their own life - saved thousands of Jews during the terrible period of the Nazi persecutions. [Yes, sir! Including Pope Pius XII, but you won't concede that!]

"Of course, there have also been bad Christians, in the general sense. There are good and bad persons in every religion, who can use their theology constructively or destrctively.

"For his part, this Pope has said many times that the Shoah was the worst evil of the 20th century, and I don't think anyone can disagree with that."

Vian spoke along the same lines, underscoring that "What Benedict XVI said were short remarks addressed to the faithful before the Angelus. The Pope, remembering the saints in this liturgical week (as he did two Sundays earlier), spoke of the two martyrs of Nazism - Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who became Catholic and a Carmelite nun with the name Teresa Benedetta della Croce, and Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who, having been deported to Auschwitz, offered to die in place of a father who had been condemned to be starved to death. [Kolbe somehow survived the starvation period and had to be killed by a lethal injection.]

"In this context, the Pope therefore recalled once more the horror of the concentration camps, of all concentration camps, and of the Shoah. There is no doubt that Benedict XVI only has total condemnation for the Holocaust, notwithstanding the accusations made these days that he knows little of history and even less of philosophy - statements that speak for themselves.

"Benedict XVI was addressing everyone with simple words that do not deserve to be instrumentalized, as Rabbi Rosen said. Nazism was characterized by a pagan ideology to which even Christians unfortunately adhered, an ideology that was clearly anti-Jewish and against the Jewish roots of Christianity, therefore, anti-Christian as well.

"Not a few opponents in Germany, Catholics above all but also many Protestants, were persecuted and killed. Think of the beatification of the martyrs of Nazism by John Paul II. And historically, there is no doubt that National Socialism and Christianity were incompatible realities.

"As for his reference to nihilism, it is a discourse that Benedict XVI has been making for some time, which he reiterated on Sunday, well aware of its complexity, therefore referring to 'the great writers and thinkers' who have dealt with the subject. And he referred to nihilism to reiterate that substituting oneself for God, or wanting to eliminate God from the human horizon, can lead to enormous consequences such as the Nazi death camps, which he called the 'culminating point of an ample and widespread reality that often has moving boundaries'.

"So I think all the critical reactions were unfounded".

According to Anna Foa, professor of modern history at La Sapienza University in Rome [and first regular female contributor to OR], "the statements of rabbis Di Segni and Laras about the Shoah as a metaphor for absolute evil should be set aside. I don't think the Pope was making a historical discourse about the Holocaust.

"On the other hand, Sofri maintains that the Pontiff meant to say that any person who is not Christian in a Christian humanistic way will somehow end up in absolute evil. And I don't think that the Pope intended to say that at all - that's all polemical journalism.

"But I do think something must be said on this subject: there is a non-religious humanism which nonetheless has faith in strong ethical values. Ethics need not always be linked to religion. There is no ethics of evil, only ethics of goodness. [But that's precisely the concept of ethics that Benedict XVI wants to emphasize in his advocacy of the natural law 'inscribed in every heart' that everyone can accept, regardless of religion or lack of it, which happen to correspond to the basic values that the Church preaches.]

"At the same time, as history has shown, religion can also lead to evil. Faith does not necessarily lead to goodness, nor to evil, for that matter. In this respect, Sofri was right. But not about denying the Pope's right to use the Shoah as a metaphor."

Thursday, August 13

Saints Pontianus, Pope (230-235) and
Hippolytus, Priest (170-235), Martyrs
(Both died in Sardinia where they were exiled
by Emperor Maximinus Thrax)



OR today.

Benedict XVI at the General Audience on the special motherhood of Mary:
'The link with Mary transforms the lives of priests'
The Pope appeals for the Southeast Asian victims of a recent typhoon.
No papal pictures on Page 1 today, despite the main story. Other Page 1 stories: Afghanistan's coming presidential elections
under Taliban threat; UNICEF says 700,000 children are victims of chronic hunger in the Central African Republic; and
'Wall Street remains uncertain' [The OR persists in making snap conclusions about the US economy based on a single day's developments.
Yesterday their headline on the US economy was: 'The recession has halted"! It's not their place - no one expects them to be the Financial Times
or the Wall Street Journal! In their news reports, they should report facts, not their perception or interpretation of fact.]


No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.


The Vatican released the text of the Pope's letter appointing Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna
to represent him at the millennium anniversary of the Diocese of Pecs in Hungary on August 23.

Apcom, which first reported on this year's Ratzinger Schuelerkreis reunion seminar in Castel Gandolfo, adds details about it in a report that reviewed the Pope's known public activities for the rest of the summer (earlier summarized by the OR). Both previous reports were posted on this thread.


The Pope and his Schuelerkreis:
Resource persons revealed



ROME, August 14 (Translated from Apcom) -Pope Benedict XVI's former students will be arriving at Castel Gandolfo on August 27 for the annual Ratzinger Schuelerkreis reunion seminar.

The Schuelerkreis includes some 40 theologians who obtained their doctorates from German universities under the advisorship of then Prof. Joseph Ratzinger.

Tney will be joined again this year by the so-called 'new Schuelerkreis' - 17 younger theologians who have specialized in Joseph Ratzinger's theology and who first joined the Castel Gandolfo seminars last year.

The seminar will last till August 30, but the Pope is expected to spend only Saturday, August 29, with them, when he will join their discussions for the whole day .

As usual, they have invited resource persons to speak to them in depth about their chosen topic for the year's gathering - this time, about 'mission'.

The two invitees, both specialists in the theology of mission, are Peter Beyerhaus, a Protestant theologian; and Horst Buerkle, who was also an Evangelical Lutheran but who converted to Catholicism at the end of thw 1980s and is a professor emeritus of the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich [Joseph Ratzinger's Alma Mater]. Catholic seminaries have faculties for 'missionology'.

It is not known which aspects of mission the Schuelerkreis seminar will focus on, but both resource persons have studied in depth the relationships, encounters and confrontations of Catholic missionaries with other religions.

While pointing out the elements that Christianity has in common with other religions, they have warned of the double risk for missionaries - an excessive distance from believers of other faiths, on the one hand, and the risk of syncretism which would make Christianity a religion just like any other.

The Pope will say Mass for his former students on Sunday, August 30, to formally end this year's reunion.

Afterwards, the Pope faces a pastoral visit to Viterbo and Bagnoregio on Sept. 6 and his apostolic trip to the Czech Republic on Sept. 26-28.

The Pope is also expected to make new Curial announcements soon, including the reassignment of the current undersecretary for foreign relations, Mons. Pietro Parolin, to be the new Apostolic Nuncio to Venezuela.

Friday, August 14

ST. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE (Poland, 1894-1891)
Franciscan, Martyr



OR today.

The only papal story in this issue is the Pope's letter naming Cardinal Schoenborn
to represent him at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Diocese of Pecs in Hungary.
Page 1 stories: US Federal Reserve cautiously optimistic about the economy; Russia's
Putin provokes new fears of conflict with Georgia as he urges UN recognition of
the breakaway states of Abkhazia and Ossetia; Taliban terrorist attacks in Afghanistan
do not spare children; a commentary praising a compassionate approach to end-of-life
issues in France as a model for other European countries. A major story in the inside
pages is a revelation of how both the US and UK governments ignored repeated warnings
from the Jewish representative in Switzerland starting in August 1942 of Germany's
extermination plan for the Jews - even as between 1943 and the liberation of Italy
in 1944, Pius XII was the only leader on the world scene who actually did anything
to help the Jews.


No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.

The Italian newspapers yesterday buzzed with reports that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is supposedly determined to be in Viterbo for the Pope's coming visit, with the insinuation that this would be unseemly in view of Berlusconi's widely reported extra-marital indiscretions for which his wife is seeking to divorce him.

AGI reports a response from the Vatican.


It's entirely up to Berlusconi,
Vatican officials say
By SALVATORE IZZO



VATICAN CITY, August 14 (translated from AGI) - "When the Pope makes a pastoral visit, the civilian authorities who welcome him always include those who represent the Italian nation, and thus honor him with their presence. It is up to the government to decide whom these representatives should be".

This was underscored to AGI today by a Vatican dignitary who is usually part of the Pope's entourage on his trips away from the Vatican.

"It is never the case that the Pontiff refuses to meet the representatives of the Italian government, since it is his duty to welcome them and listen to them - in the interests of continuing dialog on matters of peace, justice and the defense of the values that the Catholic Church advocates for the Catholic community and in behalf of the weakest members of society," he continued.

"Therefore, if it is Prime Minister Berlusconi who will represent the national government in Viterbo on September 6, Benedict XVI will be just as happy."

Already last July, Vatican press director Fr. Federico Lombardi, had brushed aside reports that Berlusconi had been denied a papal audience on the occasion of the G8 summit In Italy, saying that it had not been requested. [Also, the Pope had written a widely publicized letter to Berlusconi, in his capacity as current G8 president, on the eve of the G8 summit to articulate his hopes for positive action by the rich nations towards the poorer ones, especially those in Africa.]

At the same time, it is obvious that governments seek to respect the Pope's opportunity for a rest period in summer, when his public activities are reduced to a minimum.

This respect is particularly dutiful on the part of the Italian government, whose representatives have more opportunities than those from other nations to meet with the Pope during the rest of the year.

Moreover, there have been no reports in recent memory of any papal audience that was denied or postponed for any reason such as those suggested by the Italian media about Berlusconi (his personal life).

An exception was Pius XII's refusal to meet with Italy's postwar Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, who had requested a private audience to mark his wedding anniversary shortly after tensions had developed with the Vatican over some policy decision by De Gasperi's Christian Democratic government.

On the other hand, John Paul II defied widespread objections against meeting with then Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, ex-Secretary General of the United Nations, who had admitted his wartime association with the Nazis.

The Vatican said then that the Pope could not possibly refuse to meet a head of state who had been legitimately elected.

It will also be recalled that Pius XI would have been willing to meet with Adolf Hitler in 1938 when the latter came to visit Italy in order to speak to him directly about stopping anti-Catholic persecution in Germany.

But the Pope was constrained to leave the Vatican for Castel Gandolfo before Hitler arrived to avoid the embarrassment that Hitler was coming to Rome but not to the Vatican.

So many other personages judged negatively by history have been received at the Apostolic Palace with all the honors due any visiting head of state or government - from Zaire dictator Mobutu to the Sandinista Daniel Ortega whose government included many priests defiant of the Church.

"The Pope welcomes all visitors without raising an accusing finger. He is, after all, the Successor of Peter, whom Jesus pardoned even if he had denied him three times," the Vatican prelate noted.

Italian leaders, of course, do not lack for opportunities to meet the Pope if they wish to. In June 2007, for example, then Prime Minister Romano Prodi showed up to welcome Benedict XVI to Assisi the day after three of his ministers took part in a Gay Pride parade in Rome which featured terrible accusations made in public against Benedict XVI and his private secretary. [I had not previously read anything about these before - apparently, the Italian media exercised a rare but praiseworthy editorial discretion at the time, although they reported the usual 'obscurantist' rants agains the Pope.]

But Prodi's presence was seen as an act of respect intended to make up somehow for those offenses.







Another huge buzz in the Italian media these days is over a recent decision by a regional court affecting the rights of Catholic teachers of religious instruction in Italy's public schools, where an hour of religious instruction every week is mandated under the terms of the Vatican Concordat with the Italian government - and in view of Italy's history and overwhelmingly Catholic population.

Although attendance is not mandatory, 90 percent of Italian schoochildren (obviously with their parents' consent) have chosen to attend these classes consistently over the past several decades, for which they get scholastic credit. Those who opt not to attend religious instruction can choose other activities as a substitute and get equivalent credit. (By the way, the 'religious instruction' is deliberately not Catholic catechesis but rather a cultural appreciation of what Catholicism has meant to the Italian nation. For this reason, many non-Catholic children also attend the classes.)

Apparently, the court decision has to do with such credits, and with the credentialling status of the religious instructors, usually provided by the diocese but paid by the state. I can't understand all the intricacies, but the Italian bishops' conference is protesting the court decision as an attempt to do away with the religious instruction mandate, and a judiclal rejection of guidelines issued years ago by the Italian ministry of education.

I am hoping Sandro Magister will come up with a summary soon that the non-Italian public can understand and appreciate.

I continue to be surprised by the philosophical discussion that has been going on in the Italian newspapers about the Holy Father's almost incidental words on Nazism and nihilism in last Sunday's Angelus.

It's not the sort of discussion that Anglophone secular newspapers would even dream of encouraging in their editorial and op-ed pages, much less on Page 1. Part of it must be that few Anglophone editors and journalists today have the advantage of what used to be called a 'classical' education, in which a person was expected to be familiar with the history of Western thought including philosophy and religion, with all the Great Books of world literature, as well as 2 or more modern languages besides his native tongue and certainly, some Latin and Greek, as well.

In some ways, the better Italians continue to manifest Old World culture - after all, they continue to teach their children Latin in high school - despite the sorry state of much of Italian pop culture, and for the Pope's sake, and on that count, we must be thankful that the Vatican is in Italy.


Why do the seculars call the Pope
ignorant and dogmatic when
he proposes examining the transcendent?
by Costantino Esposito
Translated from

August 12, 2009


The debate sparked by recent words by Benedict XVI on the nihilist tendency of contemporary thought and its double slope - the dictatorship of rationalism, on the one hand, and that of relativism on the other - would seem to merit less hasty reactions, without blocking off the playing field between those who dogmatically maintain there is revealed truth as against man's freedom to search for the truth and those who exalt the absolute freedom of every human being to make his own choices against the idea that there could be any objective experience of the truth.

The first reaction that comes spontaneously, to whoever observes the issue not from standard positions but from a dispassionate comprehension of his own experience, is that in some way we are all nihilists, to the degree in which the great existential, cultural and social question that traverses our life.

In the words of Feodor Dostoevsky - one of the great interpreters of nihilism, which he saw as the most dramatic spiritual 'event' of the modern era: whether man succeeds or fails to save himself, that is to say, to fulfill with his own powers the destiny of happiness to which every "I' feels called to.

"If men are deprived of the infinitely great", he observed in The Demons, "then they can no longer live and they would die in the grip of despair" (Vol II, p. 709, Italian ed., Garzanti).

The problem of nihilism, I think, is focused on this condition: if man needs to live for something or someone that makes it worth living, then he is faced with the fundamental option of identifying what it is that makes life worth living.

It's a question that is not always decided once and for all: there is no philosophy or religion that can present an individual from being personally committed to finding that something, thus exercising his individual freedom.

The infinite meaning of self and of the world - if there is any - can manifest itself, in fact, only in my freedom to choose, in my conscious participation, and in offering my life with love.

These are questions that everyone can understand easily simply by recalling what it has meant in one's own personal experience to be welcomed, to be wanted by another, to be myself, thanks not only to my own abilities but through my relationship to a reality that accepts and confirms me for who and what I am.

The truth of the world has to do with a situation of this kind (it will be discussed in the next Rimini Meeting of Comunione e Liberazione, on the theme "Knowledge is always an event'), and cannot simply be reduced to a doctrine or a moral program, nor with a pre-fabricated ideology or an undefined utopia.

And while the illusion of every 'rationalism' is that it can measure with human standards an unmeasurable ideal, the presumption of every 'relativism' is that of denying that the human mind consists of this infinite desire, or rather, that it is made for the infinite.

Some intellectuals have pointed out - resenting and annoyed by what they consider to be an over-simplification and ingenuousness on the part of the Pope - that nihilism is something else in philosophy.

They say that nihilism (I will say it in my own words) is not only the 'devaluation of all the values of tradition', and the 'death of God' and the positing of 'new values that are immanent and anti-humanistic (Nietzsche), but also the discovery that in an era of rampant technology - an era in which what is valuable are only those things (entities) determined and created by our plans) and nothing else, we have forgotten all about the mystery of being.

This has happened not of our choice, but because the self itself rejects being held in the grip of our ideas and slips away every time we try to grasp it.

In its most enigmatic aspect (Heidegger and indirectly Wittgenstein), nihilism would be when nothing is left of being, because the self can no longer 'make itself present' among the more 'important' entities. And the truth of anything becomes literally 'impossible', because unlike everything else in the world of technology, it cannot be calculated, it cannot be assigned a numerical value. As such, it cannot be encountered nor anticipated, and nothing can no longer be considered a 'sign' of truth.

The stake in play after Benedict's challenge is that, far from ignoring this elevated philosophical issue, there must be a different way to face the problem.

The question is: will it be possible to know something 'impossible' as Derrida calls it)? Is there a way to 'tough the infinite' (Descartes's term)? Or is impossibility man's ultimate destiny?

Christ is most interesting for the human quest precisely because he represents the possibility of the impossible, by offering a way that is real and sensible to the measure of our knowledge and our freedom.

Benedict XVI spoke of this possibility in pointing to the testimony of the two martyr saints of Auschwitz, Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, who in front of the bloody hell of insignificance and negation of every possibility that the death camps were, never lost sight of their reason for living, something so evident that for it, one would willingly give one's life. A reason that made itself felt as presence, a real presence.

It is the same all-consuming presentiment that I found in another great 'nihilist' of the 20th century, the English writer Virginia Woolf, when she wrote about the 'moments of being' that make up our daily lives, which are however 'engulfed in moments of non-being which are far more numerous', as though the 'goodness' of reality were 'wrapped in a kind of amorphous padding', that is, by insensitivity and lack of satisfaction.

She continues that only 'a violent shaking', that is, 'exceptional moments', can open a rip in that padding and make things apparent and become reality.

"The warning against nihilism opens up an opportunity: I would say that out of it, a philosophy is born, or at least, an idea I have always had - that behind all that padding, there is a design; that we - all human beings - are part of that design; that the entire world is a work of art; and that we are all part of that work of art" (Moments of being: Autobiographical writings, ed la Tartaruga, Milan 2003).

Saturday, August 15

SOLEMNITY OF THE ASSUMPTION OF MARY



OR today.


Page 1 stories: Europe's central bank proposes incentives for employment programs;
new unemployment figures in the US rise again; the EU criticizes Russia's Putin
for visit to the Georgian secessionist state of Abkhazia; and the EU issues
more severe sanctions against Myanmar for new Aung San Suu Kyi verdict. The OR
continues its presentation of major religious feasts as observed in the Byzantine
tradition, which celebrates Mary's Assumption as the more traditional Dormition
(Falling asleep) of Mary. In the inside pages, a story on Viterbo, city of Popes,
which Benedict XVI is visiting on Sept. 6.


THE POPE'S DAY

Mass of the Assumption - The Holy Father offered the Mass at the parish church of Castel Gandolfo. Homily.

Angelus - From the inner courtyard of the Apostolic Palace, a holiday Angelus as customary on a major religious holiday.

MASS OF THE ASSUMPTION



The parish church of Castel Gandolfo, dedicated to St. Thomas Villanova and designed by Bernini, is located across the piazza
from the front entrance of the Apostolic Palace (below, bottom left):

Here is a translation of the Holy Father's homily:

---

THE HOLY FATHER'S HOMILY


Venerated brothers in the Episcopate and Priesthood,
Dear brothers and sisters:

The solemnity today crowns the cycle of major liturgical celebrations at which we are called on to contemplate the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the history of salvation.

In fact, the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, Divine Motherhood and the Assumption are fundamental stages, intimately linked to each other, through which the Church exalts and sings the glorious destiny of the Mother of God, and in which we can also read our own history.

The mystery of Mary's conception reaches back to the first page of the human story, to remind us that in the divine plan of creation, man was meant to have the purity and the beauty of the Immaculate .

That plan, which was compromised but not destroyed by sin, was recomposed through the incarnation of the Son of God, which was announced and realized in Mary, and restituted to acceptance in the faith by man.

In the Assumption of Mary, we finally contemplate that which we are called to reach, in following Christ the Lord and in obedience to his Word, at the end of our journey on earth.

The last stage of the earthly pilgrimage of the Mother of God invites us to consider how she followed her path towards the goal of glorious eternity.

In the Gospel passage that was just proclaimed, St. Luke recounts that Mary, after the Angel's announcement, "set out and traveled to the hill country in haste" to visit Elizabeth (Lk 1,39).

The evangelist, saying this, intended to underscore that for Mary, to follow her own calling, in obedience to the Spirit of God which had caused in her the Incarnation of the Word, meant following a new path and indeed, to immediately undertake a trip outside her own home, allowing herself to be led only by God.

St. Ambrose, commenting on Mary's 'haste', states: "The grace of the Spirit does not bear with slowness" (Expos. Evang. sec. Lucam, II, 19: PL 15,1560).

The life of our Lady was guided by an Other - "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done unto me according to your Word" (Lk 1,38) - it was shaped by the Holy Spirit, marked by events and encounters like that with Elizabeth, but above all, by her most special relationship with her son Jesus.

It was a path in which Mary, electing to meditate in her heart the events of her existence, saw ever more profoundly in those events the mysterious plan of God the Father for the salvation of the world.

Being with Jesus in Bethlehem to the flight to Egypt, in his hidden life and his later public life, to the foot of the Cross, Mary lived her constant ascent towards God in the spirit of her Magnificat, adhering fully - even in moments of darkness and suffering - to God's loving plan and nourishing in her heart her total abandonment into the hands of the Lord, becoming a paradigm for the faith of the Church (cfr Lumen gentium, 64-65).

All life is an ascent, all life is meditation, obedience, confidence and hope, even in the darkness. And all life is this 'sacred haste' which knows that God is always the priority and nothing else merits haste in our existence.

Finally, the Assumption reminds us that the life of Mary, like that of every Christian, is a journey in the footsteps of Jesus, a journey that has a very precise goal, a future that has already been mapped out: the definitive victory over sin and death, and full communion with God, because, as Paul says in the Letter to the Ephesians, the FAther has "raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus" (Eph 2,6).

This means that with Baptism, we have fundamentally been resurrected and we seat in heaven with Christ Jesus, but we must corporally reach what was begun and realized in Baptism.

In us, the union with Christ, resurrection, is incomplete, but for the Virgin Mary, it was fulfilled, despite the path that even she had to take. She has entered into the fullness of union with God, with her Son, and she draws us on and accomopanies us in our own journey.

In Mary assumed into heaven, we contemplate her, who through a singular privilege, was made a participant, in body and soul, in Christ's definitive victory over death.

"On the completion of her earthly sojourn," says the Second Vatican Council, "she was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen of the universe, that she might be the more fully confimed to her Son, the Lord of lords and the conqueror of sin and death" (Lumen gentium, 59).

In the Virgin assumed into heaven, we contemplate the coronation of her faith, of that journey of faith that she shows the Church and each of us: she who at every moment accepted the Word of God, was assumed into heaven, welcomed by her own Son to that 'dwelling' which he has prepared for us with his death and resurrection (cfr Jn 14,2-3).

Man's life on earth - as today's First Reading reminds us - is a journey which takes place constantly in the tension of the struggle between the snake and the woman, between evil and good. And this is the human situation: it is like a voyage at sea that is often tempestuous; Mary is the star who guides us towards her son Jesus, the sun who rises above the shadows of history" (cf Spe salvi, 49) - she gives us the hope that we need: the hope that we can win, because God has won, and with our Baptism, we share in this victory.

We will not succumb: God helps us and guides us. This is hope: this presence of God in us, and it becomes visible in Mary assumed into heaven.

"In her," as we will read shortly in the Preface, "you have caused to shine on your people who are pilgrims on earth a sign of comfort and true hope".

With St. Bernard, mystic singer of the Virgin's praises, let us then invoke her: "We pray to you, o Blessed One, by the grace that you found, by the prerogatives that you merited, by the Mercy to which you gave birth, He, who through you deigned to take part in our poverty and infirmity, that through your prayer we may take part in your graces, in your beatitude and eternal glory - Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who is above all things, God blessed for ever and over. Amen (Sermo 2 de Adventu, 5: PL 183, 43).

---

The Pope walks across the town piazza to and from the parish church for the Mass of the Assumption.






ANGELUS




Here is a translation of the Pope's words before the Angelus:

---

Dear brothers and sisters!

In the heart of the month of August, holiday time for most families, the Church celebrates the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

This is a propitious occasion to meditate on the ultimate meaning of human existence, aided by the liturgy today which invites us to live in this world always oriented towards eternal benefits, in order to share the glory of Mary, our Mother (cfr Collect prayer).

Therefore, let us direct our attention towards Our Lady, Star of Hope who illuminates our earthly journey, following the example of the saints who have had recourse to her in every circumstance.

We are celebrating the Year for Priests in memory of the Holy Cure of Ars, and i wish to draw from the thoughts and testimony of this sainted country curate some points of reflection which can help us all, especially we who are priests, to reinvigorate our love and veneration for the Most Blessed Virgin.

His biographers attest that St. Jean Marie Vianney spoke of Our Lady with devotion, and at the same time, with intimate confidence and immediacy.

"The Blessed Virgin," he used to say, "is spotless, adorned with all the virtues that make her so beautiful and pleasing to the Most Holy Trinity" (B. Nodet, Il pensiero e l’anima del Curato d’Ars, Torino 1967, p. 303).

Moreover: "The heart of this good Mother is nothing but love and mercy - all she wants is to see us happy. All we need to do is turn to her in order to be heard" (ivi, 307).

Shining through these expressions is the zeal of the priest moved by apostolic desire, who rejoiced in speaking of Mary to the faithful, and never tiring of it.

He knew how to effectively present even an arduous mystery like that of the Assumption, by saying, for instance: "Man was created for heaven. The devil shattered the stairway to heaven. Our Lord, with his Passion, gave us another... The most Blessed Virgin is at the top of this stairway and holds it in her hands" (ibid).

The Holy Cure of Ars was attracted above all by the beauty of Mary, a beauty which coincided with being the Immaculate, the only creature conceived without a shadow of sin.

"The Blessed Virgin," he said, "is that beautiful creature who never ever displeased God" (ivi, 306). As a good and faithful shepherd, he led by example, above all, even in filial love for the Mother of Jesus, by whom he felt himself drawn to heaven.

"If I do not go to heaven," he exclaimed, "how sad I would be that I would never see the Blessed Virgin, this most beautiful creature" (ivi 309).

He consecrated his parish more than once to Our Lady, and recommended to the mothers of his parish to do the same every morning with their own children.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us make ours the sentiments of the Holy Curate of Ars. With the same faith, let us address Mary assumed into heaven, entrusting to her most especially the priests of the whole world.


After the Angelus, he said this in English:

I am happy to greet all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors gathered here at Castel Gandolfo and also in Saint Peter’s Square.

As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, we are invited to raise our eyes to heaven and contemplate Mary, the Mother of Jesus and our Mother. She who on earth believed in God’s word is now glorified in body and soul.

May Mary’s intercession and example guide you always and renew your hearts in faith and hope. May God grant you and your families abundant blessings of peace and joy!

---

As in the past Angelus and General Audience held at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father had to bless the overflow crowd in the piazza
from the front window of the Apostolic Palace after his discourse in the inner courtyard.


P.S. A curious incident during the Pope's Mass today is reported by La Repubblica online:

German woman screams
during the Mass

A woman who was attending the Mass of the Assumption celebrated by the Pope in Castel Gandolfo today suddenly started screaming words in German.

She was immediately taken out by the Swiss Guard and the Vatican police.

It happened shortly after the Pope ahd delivered his homily. The incident did not interrupt the Mass which went on normally.

The woman, about 35 years old, had a ticket to attend the Mass. Wintesses say she seemed to have gone into a mystic trance when she acted up. She offered no resistance when she was led out of the Church.

Earlier stories posted today (8/15) in the preceding page.






'For us, he will always be
Professor Ratzinger'
Interview with Fr. Fessio
by PAOLO RODARI
Translated from

August 15, 2009



On August 27-30, the annual seminar-reunion of the former doctoral students of Prof. Joseph Ratzinger, a group of theologians better known as the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, will be held at the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo.

For more than 30 years, this annual meeting has dealt with specific topics that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has wanted to examine more closely.

Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, who has been at all the seminars, spoke to us about this year's seminar on the theme of mission in the Church, specifically, "its justification' and "mission in relation to men of different cultures and religions".


Fr. Fessio with Cardinal Ratzinger in 1999. Fessio earned his doctorate in theology in Regensburg in 1975.

It is a topic that has previously turned up with some controversy in the Ratzinger Pontificate. In December 2007, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Note on some 'doctrinal aspects of evangelization'.

The note condemned relativism and undifferentiated pluralism in which all positions are seen to be equal to each other, and stated unequivocally the justification for the Church's evangelizing mission towards non-Catholics.

According to the Note, which explicitly set out to clarify statements by the Second Vatican Council, the Church's announcement of Christ was not an unwarranted interference in the lives of non-Catholics but simply a proclamation of Christian truth.

As has become customary at these annual Schuelerkreis seminars, ex-Prof. Ratzinger himself will deliver the concluding address, generally summing up what has been discussed in the seminar.

Equally customary, the seminar has invited two resource persons to deliver the keynote lectures - the Protestant theologian Peter Beyerhaus from the University of Tuebingen; and an ex-Lutheran, now-Catholic theologian, Horst Buerkle, emeritus professor of the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.

It is not unusual for the seminar to invite non-Catholic resource speakers. In this case, the ecumenical implications of Catholic mission are integral to the discussion - specifically, how the Catholic Church carries out its mission with respect to other Christian denominations.

A regular presence at these seminars is Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Archbishop of Vienna, who took advanced courses in theology under Prof. Ratzinger in Regensburg in 1972, but he subsequently obtained his doctorate in theology from the University of Paris. He is president of the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation incorporated last year by the Schuelerkreis in order to promote the thought and theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI institutionally.


Fr. Fessio, tell us about this year's seminar theme.
This year, it is about mission, The two principal speakers are Prof. Peter Beyerhaus and Prof. Heinz Buerkle.

Prof. Beyerhaus will speak on "Missione ad Gentes - Its justification and its form today", while Prof. Buerkle will speak on "The Church andts mission in dialog with men and with different religions and cultures".

Usually, these lectures are presented separately, with everyone present, including the Holy Father. After each presentation, there are questions, comments, discussions, in which the Holy Father also takes part, and in the end, he gives a summation of the session.

Who decides the seminar subject?
We've followed the same process every year. Before the year's meeting ends, the members suggest and discuss possible subjects for the following year. Then these are presented, in order of preference, to the Holy Father who chooses his preference. Then, the officials of the Schuelerkreis decide, along with the Holy Father, whom to invite as speakers.

How did these encounters come about initially?
They started after Prof. Ratzinger was named Archbishop of Munich-Freising in 1977. He let us know that he was receptive to such encounters, and since then, he always found time for an annual reunion.

After he became Pope, we all thought that it was the end of these annual meetings, but he himself proposed that they should continue.

In between sessions, what do you do? Do you lunch with the Pope? Do you have a chance to chat with him?
We have coffee and cake, and we chat among ourselves and with the Holy Father. Usually, we have at least one meal with him - lunch, and sometimes, breakfast.


Lunch with the Pope, 2007 seminar. In the center is philosopher Robert Spaemann, who was one of the lecturers; Fr. Fessio is ne the left.

What do you remember of Prof. Ratzinger before he became Pope? Do you have any particular memories?
I have many memories of Joseph Ratzinger, but none that would shed new light on him nor on how the world knows him now.

As everyone can see. he is a person who is very transparent, very clear. One of the great joys that we his students felt when he was elected Pope was to know that finally, the world would know him as he is and as we know him, the true Joseph Ratzinger, not at all the Panzerkardinal, but a gracious, kind, and attentive scholar, priest and friend.

What has remained of your work from previous years? Have you continued working on the subjects you have discussed?
In the past two years, we have started to publish the lectures and discussions during the seminars. But as far as I know, there has been no formal follow-through of seminar topics.

For Ignatius Press, of which I am the publisher, there have been two concrete results. After the lecture by Fr. Samir Khalil Samir on Islam at the 2005 seminar, we decided to publish his book 101 questions on Islam. We also published Chance or Purpose?, a book written by Cardinal Schoenborn after the first seminar on 'creation and evolution'. [And afterwards, the English edition of 'Creation and Evolution', the proceedings of the 2007 seminar.]


At the 2008 seminar, Fr. Fessio presented the Pope with Ignatius Press's paperback edition of Jesus of Nazareth and a Study Guide for it.

Sunday, August 16

St. Stephen (Istvan) (Hungary, 975-1038)
First King of Hungary



No OR today.
(Yesterday was a religious holiday)



THE POPE'S DAY
Sunday Angelus.

ANGELUS TODAY





Here is a translation of the Holy Father's words at the Angelus today:

---

Dear brothers and sisters:

Yesterday we celebrated the great feast of Mary's Assumption to heaven, and today we read in the Gospel these words of Jesus: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven" (Jn 6,51).

One cannot but be struck by this correspondence which revolves around the symbol of 'heaven': Mary was 'assumed' into the place from where her Son had 'descended'.

Of course, this language, which is Biblical, expresses figuratively something which can never enter completely into the world of our ideas and our images.

But let us stop a moment to reflect: Jesus presents himself as the 'living bread', that is, the nourishment which contains the life of God himself, and he is able to communicate this to whoever eats of Him, the true food that gives life and truly nourishes us profoundly.

Jesus says: "Whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world" (Jn 6,51).

And from whom did the Son of God take 'flesh' - his concrete earthly humanity? He took it from the Virgin Mary. God assumed from her his human body in order to enter into our mortal condition.

In turn, at the end of her earthly existence, the body of the Virgin was assumed into heaven by God and made to enter into the celestial condition.

It is a sort of exchange, in which God always has the full initiative, but as we have discussed on other occasions, he needed Mary, in a certain sense - he needed the Yes of his creature, her flesh, her concrete existence, in order to prepare the material of his sacrifice: his body and blood to offer on the Cross as an instrument of eternal life, and in the sacrament of the Eucharist, as spiritual food and drink.

Dear brothers and sisters, what happened to Mary is also valid in other ways that are just as real for every man and woman, because God asks each of us to welcome him, to place our hearts and bodies at his disposition, our entire existence, our flesh, as the Bible says - so that He may dwell in the world.

He calls us to unite with him in the sacrament of Eucharist, bread that is broken for the life of the world, so that together we may constitute the Church, his historical Body.

If we say Yes, as Mary did, then to the degree itself that we say Yes, the mysterious exchange also takes place for us and in us: we are assumed into the divinity of Him who assumed our humanity.

The Eucharist is the means, the instrument, for this reciprocal transformation, which always has God as the end and as principal actor: He is the Head and we are the members; He is the Vine and we are the shoots.

Whoever eats of this Bread and lives in communion with Jesus, allowing himself to be transformed by him and in him, is saved from eternal death: certainly, he will die like everyone, taking part in the mystery of the passion and Cross of Christ, but he is no longer a slave to death, and will rise on the last day to partake of the eternal feast with Mary and all the saints.

This mystery, this feast of God, starts down here: it is a mystery of faith, hope and love, celebrated in life and in liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, and is expressed in fraternal communion and service to our neighbor.

Let us pray to the Blessed Virgin so that she may help us nourish ourselves in faith with the Bread of eternal life in order to experience now on earth the joy of heaven.


In English, he said:

I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors present at today’s Angelus. May your time here at Castel Gandolfo and in Rome deepen your faith in our Lord, the living bread, who brings us the gift of eternal life. Upon you and your families I invoke Almighty God’s abundant blessings of joy and peace!

---

WOW! Another precious gem of homiletic art from the Pastor of the Universal Church!







Three cheers for the Benaddict who thought up the umbrella!
Imagine if a congregation of Benaddicts showed up at St. Peter's or CG using such umbrellas!

Thanks to OR for this unusual 'view' of Papino's hair; inset is a similar rear view taken Sunday.!

Monday, August 17

ST. JEANNE DELANOUE (France, 1666-1736)
(St. Joan of the Cross, canonized 1982)
Founder, Sisters of St. Anne of Providence



No OR today.



No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.



Major appointment
at Secretariat of State

Andrea Tornielli in today's Il Giornale anticipates the announcement today of the nomination of Mons. Pietro Parolin as Apostolic Nuncio to Venezuela, with the rank of Archbishop.

Parolin was the Vatican's 'deputy foreign minister' as under secretary to Mons. Dominique Mamberti, deputy Secretary of State for foreign relations.

He will be replaced by Mons. Ettore Balestrero, who has been in charge of the European desk at State, particularly the presence of the Church in a secularized Europe.

Parolin will be among the new Apostolic Nuncios to be consecrated Archbishop by Pope Benedict XVI on Sept. 12 at St. Peter's Basilica.


The official Vatican bulletin has now confirmed the above.

Tuesday, August 18

ST. JEANNE FRANCOISE CHANTAL (France, 1562-1641)
Widow and Founder, Order of the Visitation



OR for 8/17-8/18:

At his homily on the Feast of the Asssumption, the Pope recalls Mary's calling in the footsteps of Jesus:
'Christian life is a hastening towards God'
The issue contains the texts of the Assumption homily and the Angelus messages on Saturday and Sunday. Other Page 1
stories: Japan's economy appears to be recovering but the stock markets don't seem to agree[/DIM}[once again, the OR makes
a snap judgment on an inherently fluid situation];Afghan presidential elections hostage to the Taliban?; in the Berlin world athletics
meet, Jamaica's Usain Bolt runs the 100 meters in 9.58 seconds beating the 9.69 he set in Beijing last year.


No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.


PAPAL REPRESENTATIVE
The Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has named Cardinal Franc Rode, Prefect
of the Congregation of the Institutes of Consecrated Life as his personal representative
to the 12th centenary celebration of the transfer of the relics of St. Tryphon to Kotor
in Montenegro.

The Pope's envoy to the bishops of Asia:
'We cannot celebrate the Eucharist
while tolerating social discrimination'
Translated from
the 8/19 issue of





Cardinal Arinze celebrated the concluding Mass of the ninth Asian bishops' assembly at the Cathedral of Manila.



"We cannot celebrate the Eucharist, and at the same time, maintain, practise or tolerate discrimination on the basis of religion, race or culture, of language, caste or class".

This was one of the messages of Cardinal Francis Arinze. on behalf of Pope Benedict XVI, who named him his personal representative to the ninth Plenary Assembly of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) held in Manila, Philippines, from August 11-16.

In his homily at the concluding Mass of the assembly, Cardinal Arinze addressed all the Churches of Asia, with an invitation to open up dialog with everyone in order to "construct bridges in a world which is increasingly divided", even as he reaffirmed the Church's commitment to close ranks with the poor and the needy.

The Cardinal took up the essential points that emerged in the discussions.

The emeritus Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship reproposed the centrality of Eucharistic worship in the liturgy and life of the Church.

He pointed out that "Asian cultures possess a profound sense of the sacred and the transcendent. It should therefore not be too difficult to conserve and elevate this cultural trait to honor Jesus in the Eucharist".

Regarding liturgy, Cardinal Arinze urged a greater attention to the ars celebrandi: everyone, he said, "starting with the clergy, should be able to appreciate the richness of signs and symbols, the texts, the readings, the music, the garments, and colors, of gestures and of silence".

About new churches, the cardinal said they should "clearly demonstrate" the centrality of the elements that characterize liturgy, such as the altar, the tabernacle, the central crucifix, the cathedra, the pulpit."

He also warned against abuses and 'individual idiosyncrasies' in the distribution of Communion.

The cardinal pointed out that the Second Vatican Council urged "a healthy inculturation of the liturgy" but it set strict guidelines for such inculturation.

"Faith, adoration and reverence lead to a correct ars celebrandi, which is precisely the art of celebrating the Eucharist correctly. It is the fruit of faithful adherence to liturgical norms in all their richness.

"When the Eucharistic celebration is correctly done, it demonstrates the eucharistic faith of the Church. It nourishes the faith of the Massgoers who must go home with an enthusiasm for life and an urge to share their faith."

Thus, the Pope's representative called on the bishops and the clergy to pay the most careful attention to the celebration of the Eucharist, following liturgical norms and avoiding questionable or erroneous innovations.

"The faithful," he said, "do not come to Mass for recreation, but to adore God, to praise him and to thank him".

He reminded the bishops of their task as being "responsible for the
liturgy celebrated in their own diocese", recommending that they should have liturgical commissions and permanent courses of formation.

After six days of debate on the theme "Living the Eucharist in Asia", bishops of the continent directed an appeal to all Catholics "for unity in diversity, to listen to the Word of God, calling them to faith and hope, adn to mission".

The Asian bishops consigned a copy of their final document to Cardinal Arinze for the Pope.

In their final message, the Asian prelates said the Eucharist is "the most effective missionary activity" that the ecclesial community can carry out.

"To celebrate the Eucharist means to live a faith that is rooted, cultivated and nourished by the Word of God" and is also "a living answer to the uncertainties and sufferings which afflict the world".

The bishops said that Eucharist and the Word of God are the main ways to establish a true dialog with Asian societies, which are characterized by religious and cultural pluralism.

The Mass as a Eucharistic celebration, the final document says, "has the power to make the Christian community a vigorous witness for Christ" and allows undertaking an authentic 'dialog of life' with believers in other faiths.

The bishops point out that so many practical guidelines to this end were generated by the last two general assemblies of the Bishops' Synod under Benedict XVI, precisely on the subjects of the Eucharist and the Word of God.

During the sessions, Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, a Filipino who is secretary general of the FABC, pointed out that today more than ever, Christianity in Asia "needs continuing renewal" and the "construction of true local Churches" that are capable of dialog with different cultures, religions and peoples.

He suggested this required new initiatives, especially in places where "the silent testimony of faith is the only way to proclaim the Kingdom of God".

Asia, he said, is fertile ground for Christian dialog on many counts: because of its "brilliant mosaic of ancient cultures which have contributed to world civilization"; as the birthplace of the most ancient religious traditions in the world (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam); and with "millions of persons who live in need and represent two thirds of all the world's poor".

In order to carry forward an open dialog on all fronts and in all directions, Quevedo said, the Church urgently needs formation of the laity in addition to educating the youth.

Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil of Gujarati, India, pointed out for his part that Christians in Asia, though very much in the minority, can make a difference if they live their faith in joy, and "with courage and passion".

He said that if the Christian faith is lived fully and made credible, then it can best contribute to fight poverty, intolerance, persecution and discrimination.

In paying tribute to the Christian victims of recent violence in Asia, Mons. Menamparampil [whom Pope Benedict XVI had asked to write the Good Friday meditations for the Colosseum Way of the Cross this year], he said their plight only emphasizes how much Asia needs local Churches that are strong and bring credible witness; and that they can contribute to the transformation of society if they are able to propose "an experience of God characterized by authenticity, sincerity, announcing the Gospel with words that are shown in deeds, and committing themselves fearlessly for the common good".

Giuliano Ferrara today wrote a lengthy artucle responding to three main positions advocated publicly by ex-anarchist Adriano Sofri, now editorial writer for the anti-Church, anti-Benedict La Repubblica, among other things, also expressed in letters to the editor at Il Foglio, i.e., Ferrara himself.

The positions disputed by Ferrara are: 1) that the development of supposedly painless abortion methods - like the abortifacient pill RU-486 - is to be considered as 'great and authentic progress'; 2) that Islamist terrorism cannot be considered a form of nihilism; and 3) that Il Foglio is a compromised newspaper, presenting a homogeneous content in 'conscious service of the reigning hierarchy of the Church and its head, the Pope".

For now, I will translate only Ferrara's answer to the third point. It is one of the most beautiful brief tributes to Benedict XVI that I have read. (Among the Italians who write about the Pope and the Church today, I like Ferrara best not only because I find his views most congenial, but because he is so literate. And because he edits a daily newspaper, he is able to speak out on every issue that is of interest to us who follow Benedict's press closely.)


Speaking up for Church positions
and for the Pope
by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

August 18, 2009


That Il Foglio is a compromised newspaper, presenting a homogeneous content in conscious service of the reigning hierarchy of the Church and of its head, the Pope:

With an ethical and political program, one must add, that is paradoxically incarnated by fervent believers, traditionalists and by non-believers alike in the name of a transcendent truth of which the Bishop of Rome is the repository.

We are not compromised, and our homogeneity is in our method, in our freedom and not uniformity of tone.

For me - who treads heavily like an elephant [because of his girth, Ferrara refers to himself as the Elefantino] but keeps together the savage forest that the newspaper is - the last two Popes were king of the world and a philosopher-king, respectively.

On the day that Benedict XVI was elected, our lucky headline had been 'The formidable lesson (lezione) of Professor Ratzinger' about his 'dictatorship of relativism' homily just before the Conclave.

And the following day, reporting on the outcome of the Conclave, all we had to do was add a single letter to the previous headline to read, 'The formidable election (elezione) of Professor Ratzinger'.


Ferrara and Pope Benedict after the Mass celebrated by the Pope at Santa Maria Liberatrice in Rome on February 24, 2008. Ferrara lives in the neighborhood and attended the Mass.

This is to say that I like everything about the professor-Pope, without exception. That I love him and favor him particularly, that I recognize in him an elevated authority - mental, cultural, spiritual, moral and secularly prophetic - that however, I do not mistake for the non-existent seal of canoncal power over someone like me who is not a Catholic and not even a believer.

But there is the strong charism of a man of the Church who understands our time, who is devoid of sentimentality, who has found a modern way of uniting mind and heart in preaching the rationality of his faith and in revealing the truth in tradition, a Pope who is acting to stem those tragic perils that you yourself (Sofri] refer to in your letters, at least in those passages where you write about the violation of the human and of the individual.

That all this devotion may be seen as secular obedience given freely to an institution with bimillenary weight should not be surprising.

That such devotion is amplified - and sometimes made harsh - by the rather coarse programs of conformist de-Christianization in our day, and by the secular pretext of arrogating every thought, every freedom and every social autonomy to itself, is also undeniable.

That such an undertaking is possible only because of the convergence of many different human and historical circumstances - arrogant secularism, febrile faiths, and so many other elements - this, too, should not be surprising.

Otherwise, your image of our newspaper as an enemy banner in no-man's land is perfect, and quite flattering.

FOUR YEARS, FOUR MONTHS, AND COUNTING....

AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTO PATER!

THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU ARE

TO THE CHURCH, TO THE WORLD, TO ALL OF US.

Wednesday, August 19

ST. JEAN (JOHN) EUDES (France, 1601-1680)
Founder, Society of Jesus and Mary (Eudists)
and SisterS of Our Lady of Charity



OR today.

No papal stories on Page 1. In the inside pages, a report from Manila
and Cardinal Arinze's message at the closing of the plenary assembly
of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences in Manila, at which
he was the Pope's personal representative (translated in earlier
poat on this page). Page 1 stories: Global stock markets waver;
Afghan presidential elections tomorrw under Taliban threat; serious
environmental threat in Siberia after an accident at Russia's largest
hydroelectric plant (4th largest in the world): a transformer explosion
caused at least a dozen deaths and dozens missing and presumed dead,
but it also released combustible oil into Siberia's largest river,
the Yenisei, where it has spread over an area of 25 square kms; 1200
experts have been mobilized to clean up, but they think it will take
at least 4 years to do so.



THE POPE'S DAY
General Audience today - The Holy Father spoke on the need
for the proper formation of priests to advance the mission of
the Church.

GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY




From a window overlooking the inner courtyard of the Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father held his General Audience today.

His catechesis was on St. John Eudes, whose feast the Church marks today, and whom the Holy Father cited as a model for priests and for his work in the formation of priests.

Here is what the Pope said in English:

---

I offer a warm welcome to the English-speaking visitors present at today’s Audience, including the pilgrims from India and Nigeria.

Our catechesis considers Saint John Eudes whose feast we celebrate today. He lived in seventeenth-century France which, notwithstanding considerable trials for the faith, produced many outstanding examples of spiritual courage and insight.

Saint John Eudes’s particular contribution was the foundation of a religious congregation dedicated to the task of giving solid formation to the diocesan priesthood.

He encouraged seminarians to grow in holiness and to trust in God’s love, revealed to humanity in the priestly heart of Jesus and in the maternal heart of Mary.

During this year, let us pray in a special way for priests and seminarians that, inspired by today’s saint, they may spiritually "enter into the heart of Jesus", becoming men of true love, mercy, humility and patience, renewed in holiness and pastoral zeal. My dear Brothers and Sisters, upon you and your families I invoke God’s blessings of joy and peace!

---

Here is a full translation of the Holy Father's catechesis:

---

Dear brothers and sisters:

Today is the liturgical feast of St. Jean Eudes, tireless apostle of devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who lived in 17th century France, a century marked by opposing religious phenomena and also of serious political problems.

It was the time of the Thirty Years' War which devastated not just a great part of Central Europe but also many souls. While contempt for the Christian faith was being propagated by the dominant culture of the time, the Holy Spirit inspired a spiritual renewal full of fervor, with outstanding personalities like De Berulle, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louis Grignon de Montfort and St. Jean Eudes.

This great 'French school' of saintliness would bear later fruit in men like St. Jean Marie Vianney.

By a mysterious design of Providence, my venerated predecessor Pius XI proclaimed Jean Eudes and the Cure d'Ars saints on the same day, on May 31, 1925, offering the Church and the whole world two extraordinary examples of priestly saintliness.

In the context of the Year for Priests, I wish to underscore the apostolic zeal of St. Jean Eudes, who was particularly dedicated to the formation of diocesan clergy.

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The saints have proved, in their experience of life, the truth of the Gospel - and thus they introduce us to know and understand the Gospel.

The Council of Trent, in 1563, had issued the norms for the establishment of seminaries and for the formation of priests, insofar as the Council was well aware that all the crises of the Protestant Reformation were conditioned by the insufficient training of priests, who where not correctly prepared for priesthood, neither intellectually nor spiritually, in their heart and soul.

That was in 1563. But since the application and realization of such guidelines came late in Germany as well as in France, St. Jean Eudes saw the consequences of such lack of formation.

Moved by a lucid awareness of the urgent need for spiritual assistance towards the faithful because of the inadequacies of a great part of the clergy, the saint, who was a parish priest, instituted a congregation dedicated specifically to the formation of priests.

In the university city of Caen, he founded his first seminary, which was so appreciated that soon he extended the work to other dioceses.

The path of saintliness followed by him and proposed to his disciples was based on a solid trust in the love that God revealed to mankind in the priestly Heart of Christ and the maternal Heart of Mary.

During that time of cruelty, of the loss of interiority, he addressed himself to the heart, in the words of a psalm well interpreted by St. Augustine.

He wanted to call back the faithful, particularly future priests, to the heart, inspired by the priestly Heart of Jesus and the maternal Heart of Mary. Of this love in the hearts of Christ and Mary, every priest, he felt, should be a witness and an apostle.

And so we come to our time. Even today we note the need for priests to bear witness to the infinite mercy of God, with a life 'conquered' wholly by Christ, and they must learn this during their years of preparation in the seminary.

Pope John Paul II, after the Synod of 1990, issued the Apostolic Exhortation Pastores dabo vobis in which he renewed the norms of the Council of Trent and updated them, underscoring above all the necessary continuity between the initial moments and the permanent years of formation.

This, for him and for us, is the true point of departure for an authentic reform of the life and apostolate of priests. It is also the crucial element so that the 'new evangelization' may be not just an attractive slogan but can be translated into reality.

The foundations laid during formation in the seminary constitute that irreplaceable humus spirituale in which to 'learn Christ', allowing oneself to be progressively conformed to him, the only Supreme Priest and Good Shepherd.

The time in the seminary should be considered like the time when the Lord Jesus, after having called the Apostles, and before sending them forth to preach, asked them to stay with him (cfr Mk 3,14).

When St. Mark narrates the calling of the twelve Apostles, he tells us that Jesus had a twofold purpose: the first was that they should be with him, and the second was that he should send them forth to preach.

But in being with him, they were really announcing Christ and carried the reality of the Gospel to the world.

During this Year for Priests, I ask you to pray, dear brothers and sisters, for the priests and all who are preparing to receive the extraordinary gift of the priestly ministry.

To all, I address, concluding this catechesis, the exhortation of St. Jean Eudes who told his priests: "Give yourselves to Jesus, enter the immensity of his great Heart, which contains the Heart of his Blessed Mother and all the saints, and lose yourself in that abyss of love, of charity, of mercy, of humility, of purity, of patience, of submission and of holiness" (Coeur admirable, III, 2).

And in this sense, let us now sing together the Our Father in Latin.

---

Thursday, August 20

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX (France, 1090-1153)
Cistercian reformer and Abbot
Doctor of the Church



OR today.

Illustration: Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son, 1666, Hermitage Museum.
At the General Audience, Benedict XVI says the key to 'new evangelization' is the holiness of priests:
Witnesses to God's mercy
Right photo: The Pope meets Rajiv Janine, 18, of Sri Lanka, vistim of a train accident, who was fitted with prosthetic arms and legs
with the help of an Italian parish priest. [Will post story in BENADDICTIONS].
Other Page 1 stories: An editorial commentary on Italy's Catholic culture and how it must respond to the challenges
of secularization; Baghdad hit by worst terror bombings in over a year; and teasers about UN concerns on safeguarding
voting places as Afghans vote in presidential elections today; and a meeting in Washington between President Obama
and Egypt's President Mubarak.



No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.

Is Benedict in favor of world government?:
A more careful look at what he wrote in CIV
by Douglas A. Sylva

August 20, 2009


From the FIRST THINGS symposium this week on CIV - a much-needed corrective to prevailing snap interpretations. Douglas A. Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.


As observers continue to decipher the meaning of Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, all appear to agree that the passage of note, the passage that may prove historic in its implications, is the one that is already becoming known as the “world political authority” paragraph:

---

In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.

One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making.

This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity.

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority. . . .

---

Could Benedict be in favor of world government, as many now believe?

Taken in the context of papal writings since the dawn of the UN, as well as Benedict’s own opinions, recorded both before and after his election as pope, the passage gains another meaning.

It is in reality a profound challenge to the UN, and the other international organizations, to make themselves worthy of authority, of the authority that they already possess, and worthy of the expansion of authority that appears to be necessary in light of the accelerated pace of globalization.

It is true that Benedict believes that a transnational organization must be empowered to address transnational problems. But so has every Pope since John XXIII, who wrote in 1963:

---

Today the universal common good presents us with problems which are worldwide in their dimensions; problems, therefore, which cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization, and means coextensive with these problems, and with a worldwide sphere of activity. Consequently the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such form of public authority.

---

But such an authority has been established, and we have lived with it since 1948, and in many ways it has disappointed.

So Benedict turns John XXIII’s formulation on its head: Morality no longer simply demands a global social order; now Benedict underscores that this existing social order must operate in accord with morality.

He ends his own passage on world authority by stating that “The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order. . . .” Note the phrase “at last.”

What went wrong? According to Benedict, a world authority worthy of this authority would need “to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth.” The obvious implication is that the current UN has not made this commitment.

To understand how the UN has failed, we must delve into the rest of the encyclical. According to Benedict, the goal of all international institutions must be “authentic integral human development.” This human development must be inspired by truth, in this case, the truth about humanity.

Pursuit of this truth reveals that each human being possesses absolute worth; therefore, authentic human development is predicated on a radical defense of life.

This link is made repeatedly in Caritas in Veritate.

---

Openness to life is at the center of true development. . . . The acceptance of life strengthens moral fiber and makes people capable of mutual help. . . . They can promote virtuous action within the perspective of production that is morally sound and marked by solidarity, respecting the fundamental right to life of every people and individual.

---

To some, it must seem startling how often Benedict comes back to life in an encyclical ostensibly dedicated to economics and globalization.

But this must be understood as Benedict’s effort to humanize globalization. It can be seen as the global application of John Paul II’s own encyclical on life, Evengelium Vitae.

Without this understanding of the primacy of life, international development is bound to fail:

---

Who could measure the negative effects of this kind of mentality for development? How can we be surprised by the indifference shown towards situations of human degradation, when such indifference extends even to our attitude towards what is and is not human?

---

Throughout the encyclical, Benedict is unsparing in the ways in which the current international order contributes to this failure; no major front in the war over life is left unmentioned, from population control, to bioethics, to euthanasia.

But none of this should come as a surprise. Since at least as far back as the UN’s major conferences of the 1990s — Cairo and Beijing —Benedict has known that the UN has adopted a model of development conformed to the culture of death. He no doubt assisted John Paul II in his successful efforts to stop these conferences from establishing an international right to abortion-on-demand.

At the time, Benedict said, “Today there is no longer a ‘philosophy of love’ but only a ‘philosophy of selfishness.’ It is precisely here that people are deceived. In fact, at the moment they are advised not to love, they are advised, in the final analysis, not to be human. For this reason, at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians . . . have a duty to protest.”

Now, in his teaching role as Pope, Benedict is not simply protesting but offering the Christian alternative, the full exposition of authentic human development.

Whether or not the UN can meet the philosophical challenges necessary to promote this true development remains uncertain. But it should not be assumed that Benedict is sanguine; after all, he begins his purported embrace of world government with a call for UN “reform,” not expansion.



This one was an eye-opener for me on 'Catholic economics' in the context of the secular economics I was taught in university college (the two years of humanities and liberal arts that underpin the basic university education even for those who pursue a science degree).



A return to Augustinian economics
by John D. Mueller

August 20, 2009


John D. Mueller is director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and president of LBMC LLC, an economic and financial market forecasting firm, both in Washington, DC.


Despite belonging to an organization that recently celebrated its founder’s two thousandth birthday, some American Catholics exhibit the attention span of fruit flies when their faith impinges on their politics.

Recent responses to Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate closely parallel those that greeted the last economic encyclicals: John Paul II’s Sollicitudo rei socialis (On the Church’s cocial concern) and Centesimus Annus (On the hundredth anniversary) [of Leo XIII’ Rerum Novarum].

Caritas in Veritate was originally intended for 2007, the fortieth anniversary of Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio(The development of peoples), which first noted that “the social question has become worldwide” (PP, 3).

John Paul II promulgated Sollicitudo rei socialis in 1987, the twentieth anniversary of PP. Partisan contention about John Paul’s encyclical crystallized around a single paragraph: “The Church’s social doctrine is not a ‘third way’ between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: Rather, it constitutes a category of its own” (SRS, 41).

Catholics on both the left and the right have analyzed Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical with the same dichotomous logic they applied to SRS: The Church says there is no Third Way. If not, we must choose between the First Way of Adam Smith and the Second Way of Karl Marx.

But, by emphasizing in his new encyclical the central role of gifts in the divine economy of creation and salvation, as well as in personal, domestic, and political economy, Benedict XVI (like John Paul II before him) poses a very different choice.

Following that neglected economic realist St. Augustine (whom the Pope has called “my great master”) and Augustine’s contemporaries the Cappadocian Fathers, Benedict XVI says the choice is among the same three world views that confronted one another in the marketplace of Athens when the Apostle Paul (probably in a.d. 51) prefaced his proclamation of the gospel with a biblically orthodox adaptation of Greco-Roman natural law and “some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18).

As Benedict XVI succinctly summarizes, “For believers, the world derives neither from blind chance, nor from strict necessity, but from God’s plan . . . living as a family under the Creator’s watchful eye” (CV, 57).

The First Way of biblically orthodox natural law is irreconcilable with the Second Way of pantheist Stoic necessity and the Third Way of Epicurean “matter and chance” because the latter two exclude Creation.

Yet this natural-theological difference also has important economic consequences, because the three worldviews are expressed in scholastic, classical, and neoclassical economics, respectively.

In both his earlier Deus caritas est (God is Love) and Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI employs scholastic economic theory, following the pattern set by Leo XIII.

In scholastic natural law, economics is a theory of rational providence that describes how creatures who are “rational,” “matrimonial,” and “political” animals choose both persons as “ends” (expressed by our personal and collective gifts) and scarce means that are used (consumed) by or for those persons, which we make real through production and exchange.

Thomas Aquinas was the first to integrate these four key elements of scholastic economic theory: Aristotle’s theories of production and justice-in-exchange, Augustine’s theory of utility (which describes consumption), and the scholastic theory of distribution (which comprises Augustine’s theory of personal distribution — gifts and their opposite, crimes, and Aristotle’s theory of domestic and political distributive justice).

By emphasizing the last element, therefore, Benedict isn’t inventing something new. Scholastic economics was taught at the highest university level for more than five centuries before Adam Smith effectively dismantled it.

Its adherents included all major Catholic and (after the Reformation) Protestant thinkers, notably the Lutheran Samuel Pufendorf. It was Pufendorf’s Protestant version that was taught to Smith, widely circulated in the American colonies, and recommended by Alexander Hamilton, who penned two-thirds of The Federalist.

Smith “de-Augustinized” economics by dropping both distribution and utility, launching classical economics with production and exchange alone. In effect, Smith was reverting to Stoic pantheism, which views the universe “to be itself a Divinity, an Animal” (as Smith put it in an early but posthumously published essay) and conceives of God as the immanent World Soul, manipulating humans as puppets who choose neither their ends nor means rationally, since every individual . . . intends only his own gain . . . and is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Liberal capitalism as described by Smith and Marx’s communism are thus obverse sides of Stoic pantheism. The main difference is that Smith tries to reduce all justice to justice-in-exchange while Marx tries to reduce it to political distributive justice.

Neoclassical economics superseded classical economics by reinventing Augustine’s theory of utility in the early 1870s. But by stopping there it expressed the Epicurean materialism that claims humans evolved by chance in an uncreated world as semi-rational or merely clever animals, highly adept at calculating means but having no choice of ends but self-gratification, since “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” as Smith’s friend David Hume put it.

Because Augustine placed the fact of scarcity squarely at the center of moral decision-making, Catholic claims from the left (and fears from the right) that Caritas in Veritate portends some utopian global political scheme or endorsement of President Obama’s economic policies are likely to prove equally unfounded.

In the American context, the issue most likely to quiet those claims and fears is the combined impact of legal abortion and vastly expanded social benefits, which has been the recipe for “demographic winter” throughout Europe and Asia, but now advocated by President Barack Obama for this country.

In Latin bene dictus means “well spoken” and benedictus, ”a blessing.”

Especially if it helps America avoid its own “demographic winter,” Benedict XVI’s Augustinian “Charity in Truth” will prove to be both.

Thank you, Teresa, for all the detailed reports and I love the photos of the various saints on their feast days or memorials. The Communion of Saints is one of the many richnesses of the Catholic Church and we always know we can rely on their intercession.


Thanks, too, for the interview with Father Fessio. I'm sure Papa loves these days of the Schuelerkreis. During Lent this year I attended a day of recollection led by a Jesuit [at Saint Rita's Centre, Honiton, Devon] and the theme was Creation and Evolution. I bought the 2007 book immediately afterwards.

On a lighter note: thank you for the back views of Papa showing his beautifully waving hair. All gone now! You've noticed that the barber has paid a, to us, unwelcome visit!!!!!





My pleasure entirely, Mary! My day does not begin properly until I have posted my 'almanac' and the most important news/commentary I can find about our beloved Papino... And yes, the barbarous barber has done his literal hatchet job once more, but the Shepherd grows his fleecy locks as quick and as luxuriantly as any spring lamb, so there!... I hope the Schuelerkreis comes out with a greater variety of pictures this year.

TERESA

Friday, August 21

ST. PIUS X (1835-1914)
Pope, 1903-1914



OR today.

No papal news in this issue other than yesterday's routine appointment.
Page 1 stories; Afghan election turnout greater than expected despite
Taliban attacks; Iraq back in the grip of fear following latest terrorist
bombings; North Korea claims to be ready for new talks on its nuclear
program. In the inside pages, two tributes to Alfred Hitchcock, particularly
for the film North by Northwest.




No scheduled events for the Holy Father today, but ...


THE POPE'S ARM CAST IS OFF


Here is a translation of the Vatican bulletin today:

---

VATICAN CITY
August 21, 2009

This morning, His Holiness, Benedict XVI, underwent removal of his armcast and means of (bone) synthesis [the wires used to hold the fractured bone in place as it healed] at the ambulatory clinic of the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo, which was specially equipped for the procedure.

The cast and wires were applied to the Pope's right arm last July 17 at a hospital in Aosta following a fracture of the right wrist.

The final outcome of the treatment was optimal. Functional recovery of the injured arm was immediately started and will be completed through an appropriate rehabilitation program.


Dott. Patrizio Polisca

---

It is curious that this news should come on the annual feast of St. Pius X, hero and emblem of the traditionalists!


Objective:
A single form of celebrating the Mass
which will unite the Church
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

August 21, 2009




The Roman Catholic Church should have one single Mass form.

The present cohabitation of two forms - the ordinary, or the post-Conciliar reformed Mass, and the traditional Mass, liberalized two years ago through the papal Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum - is difficult to 'manage'.

Ad the single Roman rite of the future "should be celebrated in Latin or the vernacular, but completely within the tradition of the Mass which has come down to us".

These are words which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote to the German philologist Heinz-Lothar Barth, an advocate of the traditional rite.

The 2003 letter is published for the first time in the book Davanti al Protagonista [Facing the Protagonist] (Cantagalli, 2009) by Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, which will be previewed at the annual Meeting of Rimini (sponsored by Comunione e Liberazione) next week. The book is due for release next month.

The letter is significant because in 2003 - less than two years before he would be elected Pope - Ratzinger summarized his idea of the 'reform of the liturgical reform' which he believed should proceed gradually in order to recover the sense of the sacred and more adoration of God in the new Mass, through a compenetration of the traditional and the new forms, in which each would take the best from the other.

When the Bavarian cardinal wrote that letter, he could not have known that he would be the next Pope, and therefore that he himself who would fully liberalize the traditional rite, about which, he writes in the letter to Barth, "there is still too great an aversion from many Catholics, because of what has been insinuated to them for many years".

It is curious to note how this thinking by the future Pope - which did not change with his election - is opposed by elements from both the left and the right of the Church, i.e., by progressivists as well as by some traditionalists.

The latter, finally 'legitimized' after years of virtually being banned, consider the pre-conciliar rite as something fixed and perfect, something absolutely untouchable, and are irritated by any proposal to change it, even if it were simply by enriching the lectionary and by updating it to take account of new religious feasts decreed by the Church after the Council.

The progressivists - including many bishops and priests - consider Papa Ratzinger's liturgical ideas to be a 'betrayal' of Vatican-II, oppose the liberalization of 2007, and have sought to counteract it at every turn, considering it as nothing more than a ritualistic and somewhat folklorist obsession. For them, there is nothing that needs to be changed in the new Mass.

Benedict XVI has chosen a middle way, in some ways the most difficult one, which is bound to be opposed even more by the extremists on both sides.

The new book by Cantagalli, published within its series "Instruments for reform', edited by Alessandro Galeotti, also contains another previously unpublished text by Cardinal Ratzinger, in which the future Pope reiterates his often stated belief that liturgy should never be "the ground for experimenting on theological hypotheses".

"In these last few decades," he wrote, "theological conjectures by experts have entered too quickly into liturgical practice, often bypassing ecclesiastical authority, through local commissions who are know how to publice their consensus of the moment at the international level, and on the practical level, are able to translate these into liturgical law. Liturgy draws its grandeur from what it is, not from what we make of it."

This is an observation that continues to be very relevant, given the persistence of frivolity, distortions and true abuses in the liturgy.


The article is followed by a full text of the letter to Barth. Here is a translation:

---

To Dr. Heinz-Lothar Barth
23 June 2003

Dear Dr. Barth:

I thank you cordially for your letter of April 6 to which I only now find time to reply.

You ask me to engage myself actively for a fuller availability of the traditional Roman rite. In fact, you know that I am not deaf to such a request.

In the meantime, my work to promote this cause is well known.

To the question whether the Holy See "will re-allow the ancient rite anywhere and without restrictions", as you desire and may have heard spoken about, one cannot give a simple answer or furnish any evidence without effort.

The aversion of many Catholics - insinuated to them for so many years - is still too great against the traditional rite that they disdainfully call 'pre-conciliar'.

And one must deal with considerable resistance on the part of many bishops against a general re-authorization [of the traditional rite].

It is a different matter when one considers a limited re-acceptance (as) the demand for the ancient rite is limited.

I know, of course, that its value does not depend on actual 'demand' for it, but the question of the number of interested priests and laymen nonetheless plays a certain role.

Besides this, such a measure [of having a single form of the Roman rite] - at only 30 years since the liturgical reform effected by Paul VI - could only be effected gradually. Any undue haste will certainly not be a good thing.

Nonetheless, I believe that in the long run, the Roman Church should once again have a single form of the Roman rite. The existence of two official forms would be difficult to 'manage' in practice for bishops and priests.

The Roman rite of the future should take a single form, celebrated in Latin or the vernacular, but completely in the tradition of the rite which was handed down to us.

It could take on some new elements which have been proven to be valid, like the new religious feasts, some new Prefaces to the Mass, a broader Lectionary - better chosen, but not too many - an oratio fidelium, that is, a fixed litany of intercessions to follow the Oremus before the Offertory where it used to be.

Dear Dr. Barth, if you would be involved in working for the cause of liturgy in this manner, you will certainly not find yourself alone, and help to prepare "ecclesial public opinion' for eventual measures that will favor wider use of the older liturgical missals.

Nonetheless, one must be careful not to arouse expectations that are too high or maximal among the traditionalists.

I take the occasion to thank you for your commendable commitment to the liturgy of the Roman church in your books and lectures, even if here and there, I would wish more charity and understanding for the Magisterium of the Pope and the bishops.

May the seed you have sown germinate and bear much fruit for the renewed life of the Church, for which the liturgy is and should remain its 'source and culmination", indeed its true heart.

It is with pleasure that I impart the blessing you have asked.

Sincere greetings.


Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

---

P.S. I must mention one recent story of great interest for followers of the liturgy - an interview with Mons. Domenico Bartolucci, emeritus director of the Sistine Chapel Choir, which ran in Disputationes Theologicae, an Italian-French site, and which has been translated in Rorate caeli (entry of August 12).
rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/
I will post a translation for the record in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread, soon I hope.

There's also a Xeptember 2007 editorial in La Civilta Cattolica, recalled to us by lella and her followers on

about the traditional liturgy. It was written on the occasion of the activation of Summorum Pontificum.

Viterbo ready for the Pope
by AUGUSTO CINELLI
Translated from

August 21, 2009





Fifteen days away from the pastoral visit of Benedict XVI to Viterbo and Bagnoregio on Sunday, Sept. 6, there is great ferment in the diocese of Viterbo and in all of the territory of Tuscia.

[Tuscia is the term for what was the heartland of Etruscan culture in Italy, a region bordering Tuscany, Umbria and the Rome metropolitan region, with Viterbo as its center. Present-day Tuscia occupies the northern part of the region of Lazio which includes the province and city of Rome.]

Organizers are placing the finishing touches to the preparations for the visit which is a collaboration between the Diocese and local institutions.

It will be the first papal visit to Viterbo since the creation in 1986 of the present Diocese of Viterbo from the reunification of five ancient dioceses - Viterbo, Tuscania, Motnefiascone, Bagnoregio and Acquapendente.

And it will be the second papal visit to the medieval City of the Popes since John Paul II visited in 1984; for Bagnoregio, hometown of St. Bonaventure, the first by a Pope.

Perhaps the choice of Viterbo for a papal visit was also dictated by Pope Benedict's personal connection to St. Bonaventure, a Doctor of the Church ('the Seraphic Doctor') and contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was born Giovanni Fidenza in Bagnoregio around 1217. [He was renamed Bonaventura (good fortune) after he was miraculously healed of a childhood illness by St. Francis of Assisi.

Bonaventure's theology of history was the subject of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger's dissertation in 1957 to qualify for his Habilitation as a German university professor. First published two years later in the original German under the title St. Bonaventure: The theology of history, it was recently re-published in Italy.

Thus, in the afternoon of his visit to Viterbo, the Pope will fly by helicopter to Bagnoregio and venerate the only relic of the saint in Italy, the 'holy arm' kept in the co-cathedral of San Nicola. {The rest of his body is in Lyon, where he died in 1284.)

The high point of the visit will be the Eucharistic celebration to start around 10:15 at the Valle Faul, the plain below the elevation on which the Palazzo dei Papi and the Cathedral of San Lorenzo are located.



The organizers said that the plain has been prepared to accommodate the altar-stage for the Mass and a crowd of at least 10,000 who can be accommodated for the Mass adn the Angelus.

There will be jumbo TV screens at certain points of the city for those who have not tickets to the Mass.

Concelebrating with the Pope will be Cardinal Agostino Valli, the Pope's Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, 30 bishops from teh Lazio region adn at least 200 diocesan priests.

The Pope will also be paying homage to the other patron saints of the diocese - St. Rosa, co-patron of the city, and the Madonna della Quercia, a miraculous image of Mary venerated in a shrine outside Viterbo. (The shrine includes a monastery where the Pope will have lunch and his customary post-luncheon rest before undertaking his afternoon program.)

Since the day the pastoral visit was officially announced last December 8, the church community in Viterbo embarked on an intense program of spiritual preparation, with periodic interventions by the Bishop of Viterbo, Mons. Lorenzo Chiarinelli, who has said in his welcoming message: "The Church of Viterbo which has always been linked to Peter's Chair, welcomes the Successor of Peter to be confirmed in the faith,and with confidence in the future, cultivating among so many local examples of holiness, the fascinating message of St. Nonaventure of Bagnoregio".

The bishop has met with representatives of the various parishes and local church associations to give pointers on what must be emphasized to the faithful in their spiritual preparation.

He also appeared before the communal councils of both Viterbo adn Bagnoregio, meeting in extraordinary session, to describe the preparations for the visit. Last Wednesday, he met with the youth volunteers who will be assisting the faithful on the day of the visit.


Viterbo, where the Papal Conclave was born
Translated from

August 21, 2009

Benedict XVI will be the 55th Pontiff to visit Viterbo, which prides itself as the medieval City of the Popes.

Five Popes were elected here, and four of them are buried here.

In fact, from 1227-1281, Viterbo was the seat of the Papacy for political and military reasons, not to mention the therapeutic properties of its thermal springs, for which the city was known before then.

The papal residence was established in the Bishop's palace which was enlarged and renovated to the magnificence befitting a papal residence.


Front and rear views of the Palazzo dei Papi.

The complex - a symbol of medieval Viterbo - is known today as the Palazzo dei Papi, best known for its Conclave Hall.

The term 'conclave' from the Latin cum clave (under lock and key) was coined here on tehe occasion of the longest papal election in history: 36 months and a day.

In 127q1, the Viterbans, tried of three years of indecisions by the cardinals meeting to elect a success for Urban IV, locked them in the Great Hall of the apostolic palace, opening a part of the roof to give them air while they decided. And they did, within one day, electing Gregory V.

A new book, Viterbo e i Papi, prepared for the occasion of the papal visit, reconstructs after careful research the story of the presence of Popes in Viterbo up to the visits by Pius IX in 1857 and by John Paul II in 1984.

The book, written by Mons. Salvatore Del Ciuco, will be presented in a special edition to Benedict XVI, as well as to civilian authorities.

It contains previously unpublished accounts of the first Conclave of Viterbo, particularly the role played by St. Bonaventure in appealing to the cardinals to come to an agreement on their choice for Pope.

In this context, Benedict XVI's visit is seen as a splendid seal for the new millennium nine centuries after the Popes first came to Viterbo.

Saturday, August 22

THE QUEENSHIP OF MARY


OR today.

The only papal story in the issue is a a brief item that the Holy Father's arm cast
was taken off yesterday. Page 1 stories: Btoh candidates claim victory in Afghan
presidential elections but electoral commission says results will not be known till
August 25 at the earliest; China pr0jects 8.5% growth in 3rd quarter of 2009 after
record 7.9% in the 2nd quarter; Iran authorizes IAEA to inspect a nuclear plant
in Arak; North Korea puts out more signals it wants to dialog; and as more small
boats with African migrants reach Italy seeking a new home, five Eritreans who
survived 20 days in the open sea after their boat capsized killing 73 of their
companions, claim dozens of ships passed them without stopping to help - Italy will
investigate such violation of the international law obliging help on such occasions.



No bulletins so far from the Vatican Press Office.

Benedict XVI's reform
of the liturgical reform:
NO to receiving the Host
in one's hands
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

August 22, 2009


A document handed to Benedict XVI on the morning of April 4 by Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. contained the results of a private vote, taken March 12, at the plenary assembly of the CDW, and may well be the first formal step towards the 'reform of the llturgical reform' that Joseph Ratzinger has spoken and written about countless times.

By near-unanimous vote, the cardinals and bishops who are members of the CDW voted to uphold more 'sacredness' in the Mass, a recovery of the sense of Eucharistic Adoration, and a revision of the introductory parts of the Novus Ordo missal in order to rein in abuses, experimentation and inappropriate 'creativity'.

They also favor a re-statement that the usual way of receiving Communion under existing norm is not in the hands, but on the mouth. it is true that there was an indult which allowed, upon the request of a diocese, allowing priests to distribute Communion on the palm of the hand, but this was an exceptiona and should remain so.

[Mons. Guido Marino, the papal master of liturgical ceremonies, pointed out this norm in 2007 when the Pope first started giving Communion on the mouth. I had expected an outcry from outraged bishops and progressives who - for some reason someone still has to write a good story on - have long behaved as though Vatican-II had also abolished the practice of Communion on the mouth, but it never came. I have never been able to think of a reason why anyone would ever have proposed receiving the Host in the hands. Even for practical reasons, it is not convenient and quite unhygienic.

The lack of an outcry is probably because no one could possibly 1) argue against receiving Communion on the mouth and 2) claim that receiving the Host in one's hands is infinitely the better way. Of course, they may well argue - once the Church re-states the norm formally - that people have been used to receiving the Host in the hands for 40 years now, and one should not make them change. But this is an argument that they would never apply to the fact that the traditional Mass has been celebrated in that form since the Council of Trent more than 500 years ago! And yet they thought nothing of chucking it overboard virtually overnight in 1969.

Well, it is high time the norm of reciving Communion on the mouth, preferably in a kneeling position, be dusted off and presented to the faithful anew!]

Cardinal Canizares, the Pope's 'minister for the liturgy', has also ordered a study of considering a return to saying the Mass ad Orientem, at least at the moment of the Consecration.

Before Paul VI's 1969-1970 liturgical reform, all Masses were said with both the priest and the congregation facing the altar (representing the East, the direction of the rising Sun, symbol of Christ), or as the progressives and secular press like to say, with the priest turning his back on the congregation.

[Of course, the expression 'turning his back on the congregation' betrays the progressive bias that it is the congregation who matters most during Mass - which they consider to be a communal banquet rather than recreating Christ's Sacrifice - and not Christ in whose name the Sacrifice is re-created and offered! I should really check whether Sacrosanctum consilium provides explicitly for the 'kumbaya' setting adopted in the Novus Ordo!]

Those who know Cardinal Canizares, who was called 'the little Ratzinger' during his time at the Congregationf or the Doctrine of the Faith, know that he fully intends to carry forward the Pope's 'reform of the reform', on the basis of what Vatican-II actually prescribed in Sacrosanctum concilium, much of it ignored zand therefore 'overruled' by the liturgical reforms set in place in 1969-70.

In an interview with the monthly magazine 30 GIORNI a few months ago, the Spanish cardinal said in that regard: "Changes were made for the simple desire to make a change from the past, which was considered all negative and therefore to be overcome. Liturgical reform was considered a rupture with tradition, rather than an organic development of Tradition."

The 'propositions' voted on the CDW members last March also include encouraging the use of Latin in diocesan celebrations, at least during the major Church feasts, and the publication of bilingual Missals containing the Latin text of the Mass with the vernacular translation (such as even Paul VI himself had wanted).

The DCW 'propositions' submitted to the Pope are perfectly in line with what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had often expressed about the ways in which Vatican-II's intentions for liturgical reform ended up being ignored, distorted and abused.

Such ideas were also expressed in the previously unpublished excerpts taken from the book Davanti al Protagonista (Cantagalli), a collection of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI's texts on liturgy, which is coming out next month in Italy and will be previewed at the Comunione e Liebreazione annual Meeting in Rimini next week.

Cardinal Ratzinger was always careful to note that carrying out a 'reform of the reform' would take time and must be undertaken gradually. The Pope is convinced that acting in haste will not be useful, and that directives should not simply come from the top but must have some momentum among priests and faithful in order not to end up being dead letters.

Ratzinger's reform style has been one of honest confrontation and above all, of leading by example. As he did with giving Communion to persons kneeling and receiving the Host on the mouth.





Ratzinger-Benedict XVI proves consistent:
His defense of liturgy from abuses
shows the same rationale as
lifting the FSSPX excommuications
by Martino Cervo
Translated from

August 21, 2009


A few months after publishing some previously unpublished writings of Karol Wojtyla, Cantagalli publishing house is coming out with a collection of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI's writings on liturgy, including two that had been previously unpublished.

The book Davanti al Proagonista (Before the Protagonist) will be previewed at the annual C&L Meeting at Rimini which opens tomorrow.

Gathered together, Joseph Ratzinger's positions on the sensitive question of post-Vatican II liturgical reforms provide a key to understanding the controversies linked to the Council, often reduced to a simple feud between conservatives and progressivists, between political left and right.

The more interesting of the 'new' material [both 'unpublished' texts were available online] is the letter to the traditionalist advocate Heinz-Lothar Barth, dated June 23, 2005 (less than two years before Ratzinger would be elected to succeed John Paul II), which is translated for the first time in Italian.

The cardinal responds to Barth's appeal that he involve himself more actively in the efforts to re-institute the traditional Mass into the Church - as Benedtc VXI would do on July 7, 2007, with the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.

ACtually, the cardinal's letter shows the clarity of judgment which would also lead him eventually to revoke the excommunication of the four FSSPX bishops consecrated without Vatican permission by Mons. Marcel Lefbevre.

The key sentence in the future Pope;s letter says: "The Roman rite of the future should take a single form, celebrated in Latin or the vernacular, but completely in the tradition of the rite which was handed down to us".

Once again, what prevails is the desire for unity which overrides any schematics regarding liturgy, which, according to Cardinal RAtziinger, "must not be ground for experimentation of theological hypotheses" sicne liturgy "draws its grandeur from what it is, not from what we make of it".

There is no trace od mere traditionalism, but rather - as the other writings in the book consistently show - an insistent and powerful appeal in behalf of liturgy itself as an expression of Christianity, as the personal participation of every Christian in the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection.

Without this key illumination, one cannot understand the disputed act of mercy that the Pope carried out for the Lefebvrians, which was unfortunately aggravated by the Holocaust-denying statements of one of the FSSPX bishops.

But the letter to Barth reveals, at a time beyond 'suspicion', what Ratzinger's true concern was: to hold together in the single liturgy of the Roman rite all those who acknowledge Christ as man's salvation, the answer to man's questions.

A liturgy that is immutable in substance because Christianity's doctrine remains unchanged, even as it continuously regenerates as a 'compagnia sempre riformanda' - as Benedict XVI, denounced and tagged as nothing but a 'conservative' in the worst sense, characterizes the Church that he leads.

And with a good dose of prophecy, Ratzinger makes a concluding remark in the letter, which has become applicable to himself and the opprobrium he has attracted from heterodox members of the Church: "...here and there, I would wish more charity and understanding for the Magisterium of the Pope and the bishops."

"May the seed you have sown germinate and bear much fruit for the renewed life of the Church, for which the liturgy is and should remain its 'source and culminatio', indeed its true heart," he concludes.

More than a theological concern, his intuition appears sustained by an anthrology - quite Thomistic and Christinaly realist - which emerges in the other previously unpublished work presented in the chapter on "The theology of liturgy" [which is also the title of Volume 1, collecting all his writings on liturgy, in The Collected Works of Joseph Ratzinger, so far published only in German].

The text is a lecture given by the Cardinal in July 2001. Just as with the Lefebvrians or with the traditional Mass, Ratzinger's concern is not about 'steering to the right', but he does make clear that reforms in the Church and in the liturgy cannot consist in progressivist revisions intended to 'adapt' the Church to the times.

Rather, keeping in minr the lessons of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio in his theology of history, Ratzinger suggests an 'ablatio' - a subtraction that reduces doctrine to the bare essential truth and to exalt it, namely to Christ who gives himself to mankind and to each human being.

This is the only reform - a personal one of relationship with Christ - which can and should animate the Church. A conversion, not a formula; an event, not a theory.

That is why, even in considering the Paschal mystery, Ratzinger negates all dualisms: Christ on the Cross is history and faith, an event of God-made-flesh on earth, sacrifice and redemption.

Even if, he notes, contemporary thinking is divided: "Our image of God," he writes. "has faded. It is closer to deism. Modern man cannot imagine how the human being could possible do harm to God, much less that man needs to expiate himself before God."

Faith, he writes, 'does not see the finite as negation but as creation". He echoes Thmas Aquinas with his trust in the senses and in things - in perceived reality - as 'good things', in the words of Genesis.

And he opens wide the doors of a faith which, through liturgy, reveals and fulfills a step of reason rather than theology.

The sixth essay in FIRST THINGS's online symposium on CIV is one of those rare 'internalizations' of the encyclical that go beyond facile surface reading.

Benedict XVI, Economist
by Ivan Kenneally

August 21, 2009


Benedict XVI recently issued his third and greatly anticipated encyclical Caritas in Veritate and it was immediately parsed by political analysts and operatives for partisan evidence of their Catholic bona fides.

Liberals were generally pleased that the Pope criticized the excesses of capitalism and globalization, extolled the virtues or property redistribution [I don't think Benedict XVI has ever used the term 'property redistribution' which is outright socialistic - he is always careful to say 'equitable distribution of the world's resources", Note 'equitable' not 'equal'!], and defended the claims [not the 'claims' - the 'rights'!] of labor unions.

Even better, they were dizzy with enthusiasm regarding his call for the creation of a “true world political authority” to protect the disenfranchised from systemic poverty.

It’s easy to forget that only a few years ago the Pope was roundly criticized by liberals for his anachronistic attachment to conservative values and tradition; now with one encyclical he has become fully rehabilitated and, in the grand tradition of Jeremiah Wright, is an important spiritual advisor to President Obama. To hear the liberal embrace of the latest encyclical’s economic recommendations, one would think it was co-authored by Larry Summers.

However, liberals who scrutinize the document with the care it deserves will find their celebration has been premature.

First of all, the encyclical is not an economic policy paper with the primary intention of advocating any particular institutional program.

Benedict goes to great pains to stress from the beginning that the Catholic Church “does not have technical solutions to offer” and that its central concern is not economic development per se but “integral human development,” or the understanding of true human progress as a “vocation.”

For Benedict, a proper understanding of the challenges to our moral development “requires further and deeper reflection on the economy and its goals” but this is only a first step towards bringing about a “profound cultural renewal” that could not legitimately be captured by the technical language or categories of academic economics.

In fact, the entire encyclical is marked by a principled skepticism regarding any political or institutional response to a set of problems that “are not primarily of the material order.”

Generally speaking, “institutions by themselves are not enough” partly because, like individuals, they are vulnerable to corruption and partly because any genuine moral progress “involves a free assumption of responsibility in solidarity by everyone” that is negated by excessive state coercion.

More specifically, Caritas in veritate is devoted to the virtue of charity understood in light of the “commitment to the common good” which has “greater worth than a merely secular or political stand would have.”

According to Benedict, true charity is an individual vocation that can only be properly practiced by a free and responsible person — its exercise surely has political implications but is not first and foremost a political virtue.

While charity “demands justice” it also “transcends justice” —authentic charity is not reducible to some technocratic mechanism or easily encouraged by bureaucratic regulation. Rather than a duty of the state, it is an obligation of the soul.

The “great challenge” that confronts us is today is the apparently irrepressible fact of globalization or what the Pope calls an “explosion of worldwide interdependence.”

In itself, globalization is neither good nor bad — if “suitably understood and directed” it can function as an engine of economic growth, opportunity, and prosperity and, if “badly directed,” can lead to unprecedented levels of poverty and oppression.

The political problem of globalization, according to Benedict, is that the “new context of international trade and finance” which corresponds to the “increasing mobility of financial capital and means of production” exposes and strains the limitations to the sovereignty of the modern state.

In other words, the world of finance continues to become more fluid and truly international while the moral stewardship of international exchange is still largely conducted by compartmentalized states, some of which are incapable of properly competing and others who are shamefully predatory.

This is not intended as a justification for simply dismissing sovereignty (a conclusion the Pope calls “precipitous”) — it should be the case that that increased access to the global marketplace and increased wealth and economic self-sufficiency will produce greater and stronger opportunities for national self-determination.

Nevertheless, the pope’s abiding fear is that globalization has the potential to “undermine the foundations of democracy” and disguise economic warfare as collaboration.

So while the Pope does recommend the establishment of a “true world political authority” this shouldn’t be thoughtlessly conflated with something akin to Al Gore’s recent call for “global governance.”

Benedict is careful to point out that any international institution must be authentically democratic and devoted to the fostering of democracy among its members and that any centralization of power must be appropriately deferential to the “involvement of local communities in choices and decisions” that ultimately affect their own economic fate.

While he wants to protect poorer countries from abuse and destitution he also recognizes that they are often to blame for their economic failures and that it is imperative any such federation work toward “sustaining the productive capacities of rich countries.”

Benedict never argues that profit is evil or that free markets are inherently immoral — his argument is that “without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function.”

In fact, what he most deeply pines for is the opportunity for individuals to “freely choose to act according to principles other than pure profit, without sacrificing the production of economic value in the process.”

This is not a condemnation of free markets as immoral but rather a reflection on the dangers posed to both freedom and markets when economic activity is completely delinked from “fully human outcomes.”

Today, the advocacy for greater and more centralized regulation is almost always attached to an ideologically dogmatic dismissal of capitalism and free markets.

Sadly, the recognition of the moral and political limitations (as well as economic) of an excessively “consumerist” and “hedonistic” approach to economics usually brings with it the unwelcome baggage of socialistic paternalism.

At the heart of this updated Marxism is the pregnant expectation of a post-political triumph that finally discovers technocratic solutions to what has traditionally been considered permanent political problems.

Benedict distinguishes himself from these fantasies by reflecting on the “danger constituted by utopian and ideological visions” that hastily dismiss political reality thereby placing its “ethical and human dimension in jeopardy.”

Whatever the ultimate promise of globalization may be, there are limits to the kind of human community we can build for ourselves—we are rightfully animated “to some degree by an anticipation and prefiguration of the undivided city of God,” but we never “overcome every division and become a truly universal community.”

Original sin — the fact of our “wounded natures” — will always express itself in the necessary imperfection of every human arrangement. So, for all of Benedict’s discussion of a world political authority, only “God is the guarantor of true human development.”

For Benedict, globalization is not merely the result of blind and impersonal Historical forces but rather the organic outgrowth of our deep longing for spiritual unity.

While the family, and by extension the local community, are the most natural stages for moral flourishing, we are “constitutionally oriented towards ‘being more,’” always striving to further approximate the image of God in which we are made.

This basic and intestinal inclination towards transcendence expresses itself in the technological dimension of our freedom as well, evidenced by our ceaseless attempts to conquer and control the forces of nature by our own efforts.

The grave danger, what the Benedict identifies as the “cultural and moral crisis of man,” is that by “idealizing” either economic or technological progress as the ultimate human goals we detach them both from moral evaluation and detach ourselves from moral responsibility.

Both of these idealizations produce the intoxicating sensation of our own self-sufficient “autonomy” or “absolute freedom” that “seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things.”

Our freedom, the Pope argues, must always be understood in conjunction with our moral responsibility, rooted in a recognition of that which limits us. [Ah, but those who relativize everything because they claim there can be no absolute truth, do in fact claim that freedom must be absolute, i.e., not bound to any responsibility, moral or otherwise, only to its total and unbounded expression!]

Our gravitational pull towards “being more” should never be confused with the possibility of “being anything” — the pernicious and radically un-conservative pretense that our being is the product of ex nihilo self-construction has the paradoxical consequence of reducing our existence to “being nothing.”

The Church has no intention of simply opposing globalization precisely because its deepest causes are to be found in the spiritual composition of man.

In fact, our moral desire for solidarity is a temporal expression of our desire to find communion with the whole of humanity in the Kingdom of God and the “recognition that the human race is a single family.”

Following Paul, Benedict XVI affirms that the Church can be seen as an authority on globalization largely because of its “characteristic attribute: a global vision of man and the human race.”

Because of the insuperable limitations on political life, however, the “principle of solidarity” must always be counterbalanced by the “principle of subsidiarity” or the “expression of inalienable human freedom.”

The combination of these allows the Church to navigate between the two excesses of unfettered “social privatism” and an unwieldy “paternalistic social assistance.”

It is precisely this balance that allows Benedict to distinguish his view from “various forms of totalitarianism” which, unlike Christianity, attempt to “absorb” the individual, effectively “annihilating his autonomy.”

The statist argument typical of the American left — that economic activity must be politically managed by a bureaucratic elite for a collective moral end — has been so decisively discredited that it has made it difficult for conservatives to criticize the real moral inadequacies of free market capitalism.

A moral criticism of mercenary economic activity, especially with respect to the stress and dislocation it can visit upon the family, is deeply conservative in spirit.

The reflexive distancing evident in so many otherwise conservative quarters from the encyclical’s moral teaching is powerful evidence that conservatism today is often overrun by its libertarian wing, especially when it comes to matters of the market.

Still, what could be more conservative than the argument that while freedom certainly demands its proper due, it is the requisite condition of virtue rather than the whole of it?

In the narrow sense, Benedict is not so much concerned with globalization as an economic phenomenon but rather the “underlying anthropological and ethical spirit” of globalization and its “theological dimension.”

It could be argued that this is economics in the grand sense as understood by the founder of capitalism, Adam Smith — that it is a subdivision of moral philosophy.

This is what the Pope seems to mean when he contends that “every economic decision has a moral consequence.” Benedict’s economics respects the promise of free markets and also recognizes their failings — pervasive globalization both threatensand supports the “inviolable dignity of the human person.”

This means that the central “social question has become a radically anthropological question” and that economics must become part of a “truly integral humanism” that respects not only profit but the moral condition of those who pursue it. This should be a conclusion that conservatives can happily embrace.


Ivan Kenneally, assistant professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is currently writing a book on American politics and the problem of technocracy. He blogs at Postmodern Conservative.

John Thavis does a good service here, focusing on one of the multiple topics that the Holy Father touches on in CIV. I only wish that he - or other Catholic media writers - would have attempted, or will attempt, a systematic discussion of the individual themese that come up in CIV as they come up in the encyclical. That would be one useful way of adequately dealing with the breadth of the encyclical... I took the liberty of substituting IT (information technology) for the word 'communications' Thavis uses in his title, as it is much more descriptive of the phenomenon.



The Pope and the new media:
A wary approach to the IT explosion
By John Thavis




VATICAN CITY, Aug. 21 (CNS) -- Toward the end of his encyclical Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI included a brief but strongly worded analysis about the "increasingly pervasive presence" of modern media and their power to serve good or immoral interests.

The two pages on communications were barely noticed in an encyclical that focused on economic issues, but they underscored the Pope's cautionary and critical approach to today's media revolution.

In particular, the Pope zeroed in on the popular assumption in the West that the penetration of contemporary media in the developing world will inevitably bring enlightenment and progress.

"Just because social communications increase the possibilities of interconnection and the dissemination of ideas, it does not follow that they promote freedom or internationalize development and democracy for all," the Pope wrote.

The Pope's critique made several important points:

- The mass media are not morally "neutral." They are often subordinated to "economic interests intent on dominating the market" and to attempts to "impose cultural models that serve ideological and political agendas," he said.

- The media have a huge role in shaping attitudes, a role that has been amplified by globalization. That requires careful reflection on their influence, especially when it comes to questions of ethics and the "solidarity" dimension of development, he said.

- Media have a civilizing effect when they are "geared toward a vision of the person and the common good that reflects truly universal values." That means they need to focus on promoting human dignity, be "inspired by charity and placed at the service of truth," he said.

Inspired by charity? That may sound overly idealistic to those familiar with some of the more popular talk-radio shows or blogs these days.

Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said recently that the Pope is not naive about what's out there.

"He knows perfectly well what's circulating on the great networks of information. That's why he says we need to reflect on the distribution of words and images that are degrading to the human person, and put a halt to whatever fuels hatred and intolerance, or whatever wounds the beauty and intimacy of human sexuality," the archbishop said.

Archbishop Celli, who has pioneered some of the Vatican's new media initiatives, said that while the Pope wants to affirm the opportunities of the media explosion he will voice concern when needed.

One example is the concept of friendship: The Pope believes it's an important element of the digital age, but risks being trivialized.

"It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop online friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbors and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation," the Pope wrote in his annual message to communicators earlier this year.

Pope Benedict faces a challenging task when it comes to communications. The 82-year-old Pontiff is definitely old school, preferring books to videos and expressing his most important ideas in documents that he writes out longhand.

At the same time, his aides have gone to great lengths to portray the Pope as a friend of new media, featuring him in text messages, YouTube videos and podcasts.

Yet Pope Benedict's teaching style is not easily reduced to sound bites or video clips. Even his off-the-cuff remarks come across as carefully reasoned.

Moreover, the Pope has found that his core message -- the importance of faith in God and the power of the Gospel to change lives -- often fails to make the news ticker.

Media interest perks up when there's a Vatican controversy, but not when the Pope talks about the need for saints in modern society.

Even the Pope's long-awaited encyclical on economic justice, timed for release as the world's leaders were meeting to tackle the global financial crisis, was bumped off network newscasts and relegated to the inside pages of newspapers by an event too big to ignore: the massive memorial service the same day for Michael Jackson.

It's doubtful any of this surprises Pope Benedict. Several years ago, he commented on the church's relationship with the media in his interview-book [with German journalist Peter Seewald] Salt of the Earth.

"The convictions and modes of behavior that hold the Church together are located at a deeper level than the forms of expression and behavioral patterns that are imposed on us by the mass media," he said.

That's no sound bite, either, but it reflects the Pope's caution against presuming that today's media culture is on the Church's wavelength.

It also implies that the media themselves should be a major target of modern evangelization.

Sunday, August 23

ST. ROSA OF LIMA (Peru, 1586-1617)
Virgin, Patron of Peru
First saint from the New World



OR today.

The only papal story in this issue is not on Page 1 - on the coming Ratzinger Schuelerkreis seminar at Castel Gandolfo.
Page 1 stories: Countries race to explore Arctic resources to take advantage of melting glaciers; US Federal Reserve
seeks new measures to sustain economic recovery; Obama prepares to launch a new Middle East peace proposal.
The inside pages have four very good articles on the state of Biblical interest around the world on the 40th
anniversary of the Catholic Bible Federation.



THE POPE'S DAY
Sunday Angelus - The Holy Father was seen for the first time in public with his 'uncast' right arm. In his mini-homily
on today's Gospel, he underscored that Christianity is not an easy faith to follow as Jesus warned his disciples, but
Christians, despite their human frailties, should trust in the Holy Spirit to achieve communion with Christ.


The Vatican released the text of the Pope's message greeting Comunione e Liberazione at the opening today
of their annual Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini on the theme "Getting to know Christ is always
an event", a theme dear to Benedict XVI.