Sad story. Any New Yorkers have any light to shed on the situation?
Perhaps Paul Baumann is too hard on many of those commenting on Benedict’s Freising remarks. Like me, most probably didn’t read the full text but were simply touched by the image of the cathedral spires and what Benedict, who really has a gift for this kind of preaching, did with it. The point of the image could have been made with any cathedral spires, anywhere, and for many readers Freising and Bavaria probably didn’t have much to do with it. Nonetheless, Paul’s observation about Benedict’s weakness for an uncritical nostalgia about the church and culture of his Bavarian boyhood is salutary. It also points to something else that has long puzzled me: the near obsession with celebrating the pope—whatever pope—on the part of some Catholic intellectuals.
As he frequently does, Fr. Robert Imbelli had an admiring post last week about something Pope Benedict had recently said. Titled “Images of Gratitude,” the post linked to Benedict’s remarks on the occasion of his being made an honorary citizen of Freising, Germany, where he had attended seminary in the years immediately after World War II. With a few exceptions, most of the comments on Fr. Imbelli’s post were positive reactions to the pope’s sentiments and his intensely parochial piety.
I eventually read Benedict’s address to the townspeople of Freising. I thought it unexceptional and thereby perfectly suited to the blandness of this particular civic ritual. Popes and other public figures have to say such things all the time. What I found surprising was the adulation the pope’s remarks elicited. His appreciative recollections concerned family, neighbors, Catholic feast days, walks in the countryside, the numinous aura of Freising’s medieval cathedral, and cherished memories of his ordination. “At the seminary we were one family,” the pope recalls, and Freising “became a real homeland to us, and as a homeland it lives on in my heart.” The war and the crimes of Nazi Germany are mentioned, but seem vague and distant shadows in Benedict’s telling of the hardships and joys, the cold dormitories, study halls, “and so forth” of his seminary training. Tellingly, he concludes by praising the “real Bavarian culture” of his youth.
It was curious, at least to me, that Benedict spoke nostalgically of what was in fact a desperate and nightmarish time. One explanation for this, of course, must have been his relief that the war was over and the Nazis vanquished. Still, most of Germany lay in utter ruins, tens of millions of Germans were dead, and millions more forcibly displaced or imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands of German women had been raped. The Jews of Germany had been almost entirely exterminated. Yet the pope hints at little of this in his recollections of a somehow still pristine postwar Bavaria. Instead, and in familiar Ratzinger fashion, we get a paean to an idealized version of German village life–“of being part of a whole”–before the disruptions and depredations of our modern, technological age. Benedict’s admirers cast him as forward-looking, but that is hard to square with his ardent longing for the “old rite[s]” and venerable “homeland” of his German youth, and his determination to leave unmentioned the poisonous ethnic, cultural, and political hatreds that destroyed the world he idealizes. (Freising is but a stone’s throw from Dachau.) Benedict is a formidable theologian from whom all of us have a great deal to learn. Yet as a cultural critic, he has his blind spots.
Perplexed by Benedict’s remarks, I asked a friend who lived in Germany for many years to explain to me what Benedict meant when he praised “real Bavarian culture.” His response follows.
The interesting and to me key moment, rhetorically and symbolically, is Benedict’s evocation of the Munich airport, which he acknowledges is impressive, modern, and specifically cosmopolitan (”global and open to the world”)–then goes on in effect to dismiss these qualities over against the abiding loftiness of faith and the immensity and beauty of the Bavarian alpine landscape. This trope is the key to the values underlying “Bavarian culture.” It is profoundly rural, village-based, anti-urban and anti-cosmopolitan. Thus is Munich referred to by its residents–proudly–as “not a city, but the world’s biggest village.” The Bavarian culture he refers to culminates annually in Christmas, which draws together the religious with the all-important village rituals, lavish festive cooking and baking, and handcrafts. The wood carvings. The endless elaborated crèches. The caroling. Those immense horns they play. The festive garb. It’s one of those cultural places where Christianity sits most happily and comfortably atop the prior pagan seasonal rituals.
A fathomless sentimentality draws together these recollections for older Germans, and especially for Bavarians–a virtual cult of Heimat (one’s home place) expressed through effusive feelings of Heimweh (longing for home). The walks through fields and along river banks are standard props of these pastoral Heimat nostalgia narratives. That they are a bit foggy and overly generic coming from Benedict may indicate either the brevity of that time in his life, or the competing clang and clamor of the wartime reality he seems intent on excluding…or even perhaps something perfunctory in his rendering of them for this audience. It would be exactly what they expect and want to hear, after all; he’s singing their song.
What he needs, as antidote to this sentimentality, is a viewing of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s new film The White Ribbon. Heimat and Heimweh are the reason such films are made.
As pope, Benedict has expended much of his energy promoting traditional markers of European Catholic identity. Unfortunately, there are some very dark threads running through the Bavarian culture Benedict remembers so partially. Few of us are reliable historians when it comes to understanding the world that surrounded us in our youth. Popes are no exception.
The Tim Tebow ad we discussed below was sweet. None of my worries that it would suggest that the only valuable life is “successful” life materialized. The complaint that it endorses violence against women (an alternative version of the ad features Tim “tackling” his mother) strike me as, well, quite forced.
The only way I would have known it was a pro-life ad, however, was the publicity. Deprived of the context, it could have been an ad for tetanus shots. Of course, I didn’t actually watch the Superbowl, but watched the last couple of episodes of Season Two of Mad Men instead–which explains my focus on advertising strategy.
Tony Judt, professor modern European history at New York University, author most recently of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In the January 14, 2010, issue of that journal, he published the first of a series of autobiographical essays. Here is how the first essay, entitled “Night,” began:
I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig’s disease. Motor neuron disorders are far from rare: Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and a variety of lesser diseases all come under that heading. What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.
“Physical inanition” he calls it in another place, the result being that he is now ”effectively quadiplegic.” Despite, perhaps because of, the laconic style, the essay is painful to read. Subsequent essays have been in the form of memoirs of his childhood and youthful student experiences, but this one deserves to stand on its own.
Gretchen Morgenson, my favorite Times‘ business reporter since Joe Nocerra went on leave, has a fascinating story in Sunday’s paper suggesting that Goldman Sachs not only reaped the benefits of the financial meltdown but that it may have had a bigger hand in bringing it on than we knew.
“A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world’s biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.
“A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman — like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment — had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/business/07goldman.html?hp
Would the investment, bond, and/or insurance gurus comment on the ins and outs of the story? I’d like to fully understand what went on here.
UPDATE: And on Monday morning, we have another data set about how the regulation business is going. “In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.”
“This year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it [Chase] has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html?hp
UPDATE: NOT ANOTHER FELONY! Andrew Ross Sorkin has this gem today about an investor group paying itself a hefty dividend from a hospital corporation deeply in debt. Should we assume they were hoping for health-care reform and now think it’s dead? Or????
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/business/09sorkin.html?ref=business
I had no idea that green screen technology had come so far. I have a lot more respect for the actors–who are expected to create New York City in their heads as they deliver their lines, surrounded in actuality by masses of green vinyl, in the middle of California. Hat tip: Inside Catholic.
On TV last week my brother and I watched a fine show on bald eagles that included shots of their nests as they brooded eggs and then fed and protected the eaglets until they had matured and could fly on their own. I went looking and found a website where you can watch live a pair in West Virginia. Yesterday I noticed that there’s an egg which the pair of adults take turns keeping warm. Today I find the poor adult surrounded by a great deal of snow–one place in West Virginia has already received over thirty inches of snow, with hours more expected. In case you’re interested in watching and listening (sound effects, too!), here’s the website. It will take about two months for the eggs to hatch.
Francis J. Beckwith’s blog offers as a contribution to Black History Week some notes on the decision and efforts of Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans to desegregate Catholic schools and on his excommunication of the leaders of public Catholic opposition to his decision. (They would appeal from the archbishop to the pope but received no satisfaction from Rome.) The archbishop clearly believed that this was a case in which it was important that Catholics show a united front.
Jason Linkins of HuffPo’s Eat the Press just received a fundraising appeal from Human Events magazine, which he quotes here. It seems they’re struggling with ever-increasing postage rates for small-circulation periodicals. I sympathize! The letter also points out that these rate increases are the result of a decision by the US Postal Service Board to accept a proposal submitted by Time Warner. It apparently does not point out that said decision happened in 2007. (You can read about that in this blog post from Mother Jones.)
As Linkins notes, having discovered that the influence of corporate lobbyists in Washington can work against their interests, Human Events is outraged! Their take on it is a little bit different from Mother Jones’s (or mine), though:
This means there’s much more at stake here than the survival of HUMAN EVENTS. Free speech, and the right of conservatives to get their message out on the same terms as liberals, is also at stake.
And if the liberal media giants such as Time Warner get away with this ploy, the consequences for the future of our country — at a time when the Obama administration is trying to turn us into a European-style socialist state — could be catastrophic.
Is it possible the folks at Human Events think these postal-rate hikes apply only to them? If that’s the case they’ll surely be glad to know that the USPS is not quite as ideologically choosy as they seem to believe. I have to say I’m not as confident as they (suddenly) are that Time Warner — or any other major corporation — is primarily concerned with advocating liberal points of view.
I realize that it is proper etiquette to respond to posts in the comments section, but I feel compelled to offer these thoughts on the vacuous nature of civility as a virtue. Basically I agree with Bob Schwartz who wrote in response to David’s post that civility is “subterfuge” used to coerce the other side to agreement. Essentially Obama is saying, “Come on Republicans, just be reasonable and pass the health care legislation.” While that is a very “civil” statement, it is far from an argument. It’s rhetoric parading as rationality.
The fact of the matter is that Washington has replaced proper passionate debate over what constitutes a just society with civil procedure. C-span gives you a perfectly soporific pageant of civil rhetorical presentation, which remains completely conventional even as it tries to sound blustery and full of pathos. Actual reasoned argument tries to dismantle the false presuppositions of the interlocutor to reveal the shaky ground on which her conclusion rests. It is, in fact, not about finding common ground, but it is about showing that somebody’s ground simply is not there. Read the rest of this entry »
The annual event was held yesterday, and it hasn’t received much coverage, it seems, because it’s not usually the most riveting event of the year. But this year was different, I thought, and the politics and the optics of the event were certainly remarkable, as the breakfast is organized by the secretive evangelical network known as The Family or The Fellowship.
But The Family has had its share of scandal and turmoil this year, and the president, who is always the main speaker, is Barack Obama, who can preach with the best of them–and the event was an impressive showcase for a “religious left,” if you will. I wrote it up for PoliticsDaily (with a lot of inside baseball stuff), and I also saw Obama’s talk (as well as that of Hillary Clinton–text here) as building on the same themes as his State of the Union address and his open mike dismantling of the GOP leadership at their retreat last Friday–challenging Republicans to move beyond obstructionism and ugly falsehoods, saying both sides have learned many things, and that faith should draw even politicians together to work for the common good. Read the rest of this entry »
President Obama’s talk at the National Prayer Breakfast emphasized civility.
On Beliefnet today, Rod Dreher has a column on religious illiteracy. Dreher refers to a three-year-old interview with Camille Paglia, with these sobering paragraphs:
The decline of religion in Europe frightens this stalwart atheist. “The Europeans have become very passive, all of them,” she said. “There’s a fatigued worldliness typical of Europe right now, and that’s why nothing very interesting artistically is coming out of there.”
Can you have a vibrant culture without cult? Traditionalist conservatives say no. Dr. Paglia is inclined to agree – and says that our lazy secularism and superficial religiosity puts America at risk of succumbing to acedia, the Greek term for spiritual slothfulness. She is shocked to discover how few of her college students grasp basic biblical concepts, characters and motifs that were commonly understood one or two generations ago. This stunning loss of cultural memory renders most Western art, poetry and literature opaque.
“The only people I’m getting at my school who recognize the Bible are African-Americans,” she said. “And the lower the social class of the white person, the more likely they recognize the Bible. Most of these white kids, if they go to church at all, they get feel-good social activism.”
What are they left with? “Video games, the Web, cellphones, iPods – that’s what’s left,” Dr. Paglia laments. “And that’s what’s going to make us vulnerable to people coming from any side, including the Muslim side, where there’s fervor. Fervor will conquer apathy. I don’t see how the generation trained by the Ivy League is going to have the knowledge or the resolution to defend the West.”
Dreher also refers to the comment of a Christian theologian that “unlike ages past, when it was most important for the church to preach the Good News to the world, our situation today in the West makes it more important for the church to focus on articulating its teachings, and its distinct way of seeing the world, to itself.”
Did you miss Mollie’s post on Scott Horton’s doubters? Give that a read and come back. All set? OK.
Horton just posted a follow-up to his important piece on the three Gitmo prisoners who, as he puts it, died under mysterious circumstances in 2006. Horton describes those circumstances:
According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.
One aspect of the case overlooked by the doubters:
All the families [of the dead prisoners] requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)
(…)
The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose.
Today Horton posted a brief interview with Michael Baden, one-time chief medical examiner for New York City and forensic-science contributor to Fox News. Baden ticks off the irregularities of the autopsies.
Was it normal for the U.S. government to redact the names of the pathologists and observers involved in the original autopsy reports? No, Baden says–not in civilian practice and not in military practice. “It is necessary that names of the pathologists be known to the family for accountability purposes.”
What about the missing throats? Is it regular practice to remove organs central to determining cause of death and then refuse to release them to the families of the dead?
In cases where death is attributed to neck compression, as here, the neck organs may also be retained for further study. The families of the deceased always have the right to have a second autopsy performed. Properly qualified pathologists representing the families should be able to examine any organs retained and not present in the body at the time it is turned over…. It is not appropriate to be unresponsive to the pathologists conducting the second autopsy. If the body parts that were removed have been properly preserved, they can still be examined years later to assist in independently establishing how the death occurred.
According to one of the autopsies, a prisoner’s hyoid bone was accidentally broken while removing the throat. What does Baden make of that?
A fracture of the hyoid bone occurs more commonly in homicidal manual strangulation than in suicidal hanging. A pathologist performing the second autopsy should be able to examine the hyoid bone and larynx to independently determine if the fracture happened while the decedent was alive or inadvertently after death during autopsy removal of the larynx.
Finally, what about those mysterious circumstances. Ever heard anything like it? Prisoners who bind their own feet and hands, stuff rags down their own throats, put on surgical masks, and, while self-bound-and-gagged, climb to a height sufficient to asphyxiate themselves by hanging? Baden: “I am not aware of any other case in which suicide was accomplished in this way, at least not with a gag in his mouth covered by a surgical mask.”
Read the rest right here.
My love for opera began in high school and continued at fever pitch for a good number of years. The fanatical “high”point was during my senior year of high school when I limped on crutches to the old Metropolitan Opera House and stood for the four hours of Verdi’s “Aida,” reveling in the celestial voice of my favorite soprano, Renata Tebaldi (no Callas freak I!).
But it was the tenors who really blew me away: Caruso and Gigli (on records), Di Stefano (even once at La Scala), and Del Monaco — power and beauty were their trademarks, with their inimitable Italianate sound.
I confess, however, to have been an incipient, if reluctant, ecumenist in my appreciation of the great Swedish tenor Jussi Bjørling. His voice had nothing of the Italian warmth I so loved. But it had a nordic clarity that came not from the chest but from the head: a sort of rarefied intellectuality. Compare his recording of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” to that of Pavarotti to hear two master singers, at the top of their arduous craft, yet poles apart in sound and sentiment.
Jussi is still present to me in a strange way. Often when I celebrate daily Mass for the twenty or so oldsters who attend, I will intone the “Agnus Dei” in Gregorian chant, and there will be a lively participation. But I try to intone it, not Luciano style, but in the austere Jussi mode.
Dona ei pacem!
CNS reports on the ad limina visit of the bishops of England and Wales. Among other things, the Pope strongly defended the right of Catholic prelates “to participate in national debate through respectful dialogue with other elements in society.”
But there is only ONE Catholic voice. Money quote: “To bring a coherent, convincing message to the people, the church must ensure the Catholic community speaks with one voice, he added. In a culture that encourages the expression of a wide variety of opinions, the pope said, ‘it is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate.’”
The catch is, our tradition has been enlivened time and time again by dissenters who voiced positions in tension with that of current magisterial teaching. I’m not referring to mere cranks, but informed and faithful dissent which serves to call the Church to reexamine itself on matters of importance.
Dismissing all dissent within the Church as immature and unbalanced hardly contributes to our reputation as a tradition of fearless inquiry. Rather, we are seen as people who think in mindless lockstep. Why should people outside the Church engage in dialogue with a magisterium which disallows dialogue and respectful disagreement internally?
HT: Tony LoPresti
My characteristically spotty effort at wit in a headline below on needle exchanges is a good excuse to point to a biblical translation issue that may be well known to many here but which was new to me, and one of those quirks I always find intriguing. Brad Miner at The Catholic Thing was writing about Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” and the screenwriter, Anthony Burgess, whose knowledge of scripture was pretty impressive:
Anyway, it was in reading Burgess on the subject of his adventures with Zeffirelli that I first became aware of the camel-rope controversy of Matthew 19:23-25. That’s the story of the young man who asks to follow the Jesus. Our Lord bluntly responds that he should liquidate his assets and invest it all in charity. The young man is rich and skulks away. Jesus turns to his disciples: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Now in Greek, the primary language of the Gospel, the word for camel is (depending on how it’s transliterated) kamilon. But Burgess argued (and he is one of many who have) that since the word for rope, kamiilon, is essentially a homophone, the passage actually makes more sense if Jesus is telling his fisherman followers, in whose former trade cords and nets played such a prominent role, to imagine trying to thread a thick, nautical rope through a needle’s eye.
Others argue that the camel, the largest thing around, made for vivid imagery: big beast, tiny opening. Still others say there was once an actual gate in Jerusalem’s wall called Needle’s Eye. Other ancient cities had such narrow, low-lintel passageways designed to be the only ones left open late and requiring travelers to dismount, unburden their camels, and squeeze through. A security measure. But no archaeological evidence exists to indicate that Jerusalem ever had a Needle’s Eye. More than that, there’s support for the “rope” hypothesis in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke most of the time, in which the words for camel and rope are the same: gml. (As in Hebrew, there are no written vowels in Aramaic.)
As Miner asks, does it matter which word or image was used? Probably not. But for me the interest in such things plays up again the perennial fascination in the historical Jesus, and trying to “be there” with his listeners.
A brief footnote to Greg Wolfe’s earlier post about the death of Ralph McInerny.
I was once an assistant editor at Crisis, the magazine McInerny founded with Michael Novak in 1982. While I was there, one of my jobs was to edit and proofread McInerny’s column. It was usually the smartest thing in the magazine, and it always arrived in excellent condition, with every comma in place. If he used a foreign term (and he often did), it came with the right accent. If he wrote a long periodic sentence (and he knew better than to write too many), it held together: all the verbs agreed with their subjects; the whos and whoms hit their marks. He was an elegant writer, as any reader could tell, but he was also a careful writer, as only his editors could fully appreciate. The ability to produce clean copy was no doubt the least of his virtues, but it was a virtue — and one that seemed in keeping with some of his larger intellectual virtues. He was fastidious in the best sense of the word, not content with verbal approximations, intent on the mot juste but also on the just verdict. He had his prejudices and intellectual obsessions, but he didn’t settle for intuitions when he knew an argument was required. If he was wrong about something, it was usually because one of his premises was wrong, not because he hadn’t taken the trouble to draw out a careful conclusion. He was capable of intellectual resentment — aren’t we all? — but he managed the difficult task of keeping his resentments from curdling into malice. As I say, a careful man, whose disappointments only heightened his self-discipline.
Here’s one of the pieces he wrote for Commonweal. A taste:
The Catholic church Greene entered was not the rollicking one of Chesterton nor the Establishment before the Establishment of Waugh—what Greene thinks of the second is revealed in his review of Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. What Greene had been convened to was a Communion of Sinners, an alliance of earthly losers whose wisdom was Socratic. The elect, if you can call them that, know that they are sinners; the others are merely sinners. And an important thing about sin is that it is tawdry and a cheat. When as a boy I read Chesterton’s remark that the young man who knocks on the brothel door is searching for God I found it only a well-turned phrase; the glimpse of the prostitute’s crib in The Heart of the Matter enabled one to sense the odor of damnation. Loss and treachery and purchased sex were the landmarks on this journey with a Jansenist map. But if Greene needed an antithesis to his Catholicism, if he needed to repudiate the claim of happiness now, why didn’t he take the fashionable route and see Communism as Antichrist? Why did he pick on us?
I don’t spend much time on the Sports Pages, except when the Yankees make the final four (or whatever they call it). But, then, one doesn’t come across many articles like this too often — on any page.
Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.
Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn’t be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t.
I don’t know Sally Jenkins, but I would certainly like to meet her. The rest of her article is here.
The NYTimes reported today on the latest version of “muscular Christianity,” which apparently pictures Jesus as an Ultimate Fighting Champion:
MEMPHIS — In the back room of a theater on Beale Street, John Renken, 42, a pastor, recently led a group of young men in prayer. “Father, we thank you for tonight,” he said. “We pray that we will be a representation of you.” An hour later, a member of his flock who had bowed his head was now unleashing a torrent of blows on an opponent, and Mr. Renken was offering guidance that was not exactly prayerful. “Hard punches!” he shouted from the sidelines of a martial arts event called Cage Assault. “Finish the fight! To the head! To the head!” The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team’s coach. The school’s motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”
The article suggests that this literal blending of faith and fighting is a trend catching on in evangelical circles with about 700 such ministries in existence, and “the sport is seen as a legitimate outreach tool by the youth ministry affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches.” Anything to get ‘em in the door…right?
With the title above, a website has just been opened in order to promote and further the Second Vatican Council. Here is the description on the home page:
Viva il Concilio‘ is first of all an expression of gratitude that throughout the centuries the assistance of the Holy Spirit has not been lacking to the Church. At Vatican II, God’s Spirit did not skimp with his gifts but poured them out on us “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” (Lk 6:38) Deo gratias.
‘Viva il Concilio‘, besides being an act of thanksgiving, also constitutes a promise: only by renewed fidelity to the truth of that spiritual event will it be possible for the Catholic Church to make use of the gifts received and to keep its memory alive. Paul VI constantly recalled the Church’s duty of “fidelity to the Council.” Because it was a summons to apostolic responsibility, we must first “understand it” and then “follow it.”
‘Viva il Concilio‘ is a task that is grounded in memory, engages the present, and opens out upon prophecy. We must “remember that the Council sprang from the great heart of Pope John XXIII…. All of us are truly in debt to this extraordinary ecclesial event” (Benedict XVI). For that reason, the lesson of the last Council must be welcomed as “the great grace from which the Church has benefitted in the twentieth century. In it we are offered a safe compass for orienting ourselves on the path of the century that is opening” (John Paul II).
‘Viva il Concilio‘ wishes, finally, to be a website, promoted by Giacomo Canobbio, Piero Coda, Severino Dianich, Massimo Nardello, Gilles Routhier, and Marco Vergottini, along with Cardinals Carlo M. Martini and Roberto Tucci and Bishop Luigi Bettazzi. Here will be found: a) sources; b) magisterial statements; c) theological essays; d) initiatives (texts, videos, meetings and publications) useful for inviting the People of God to read and interpret the Church’s activity and witness today “in the light of the Council” (Paul VI).
JAK: The organizers of this website are first-rate theologians. At the moment, all of the materials offered are in Italian; whether that will change in the future I don’t know but will try to find out. In any case, it’s encouraging to know of this initiative.
I imagine this story will gin up some controversy–or perhaps not?
In short, Catholic Charities of Albany, N.Y., in the diocese of Bishop Howard Hubbard, who has a reputation as a social justice liberal, has launched a new program to provide free syringes to intravenous drug users. Catholic Charities studied the program for five years before agreeing to work on it. “Project Safe Point” will be funded by $170,000 in grants from New York State.
Religion News Service has the best write-up I’ve seen:
Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard approved the needle program, according to the diocese. In a statement, the diocese acknowledged that it may appear to be complicit in drug use, but argued that providing disease-free needles is the lesser of two evils.
“To guide us, the church provides us with the principles of licit cooperation in evil and the counseling of the lesser evil. The sponsorship of Catholic Charities in Project Safe Point, then, is based upon the Church’s standard moral principles,” the diocesan statement reads.
While a number of secular social service agencies—including 17 in New York—maintain syringe-exchange programs, the project is thought to be a first for a Catholic Charities agency. A request for information from Catholic Charities USA, the national headquarters for 1,700 Catholic Charities institutions and agencies nationwide, was not answered immediately.
Medical studies have documented that needle-exchange programs effectively reduce the spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. According to New York State Health Department studies cited by the diocese, in 1990, 50 percent of new AIDS cases were caused by drug use. By 2004, after the introduction of needle-exchange programs, just 7 percent of new AIDS cases were linked to intravenous drug use.
The story goes on to note, however, that the Albany policy seems to contradict a 1990 statement on AIDS from the U.S. conference of bishops (re-printed in 1997) which says: “Although some argue that distribution of sterile needles should be promoted, we question this approach for both moral and practical reasons.”
It appears some of those practical reasons may have been superseded. But the moral reasons? Calling all ethicists (and moralists).
Ralph McInerny — Notre Dame professor, Thomist scholar, Catholic controversialist, co-founder of Crisis magazine, and mystery novelist (Father Dowling and beyond) — was laid to rest today in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Notre Dame.
McInerny was on the other side of the political fence from most readers of Commonweal and I had my own disagreements with him.
Yet he deserves some honor for his long and distinguished career — and for a certain imaginative joie de vivre and literary flair that marked even his polemical writings — something that seems in danger of passing out of the younger generation of public intellectuals in the Church.
He was the author of works like Praeambula Fidei: Thomism And the God of the Philosophers and What Went Wrong With Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained but also Requiem for a Realtor and Rest in Pieces.
May he rest in peace.
ZENIT article here.
Check out the mesmerizing New York Times interactive graphic of Obama’s 2011 budget (and compare it with 2010).
Jean Raber proposes an interesting topic:
“It might be interesting to talk sometime about the difference between lapsed Catholics and those who take up a new denomination. A long-time friend lapsed after a priest abused her brothers years ago. She has a very complicated relationship with the Church. Criticizes it freely, but views Protestant denominations as morally ambiguous and little more than “social clubs.”
I have seen a statistic that says “lapsed” Catholics are the second largest denomination in the United States, and that half join other religious groups, while half remain unaffiliated. I’ll try to track down the source.
It’s been a while since I posted a podcast. This one is an interview with Diana Fritz Cates. We discuss her new book, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry.
You can listen to the podcast here.
On Wednesday, I am interviewing Br. Guy Consolmagno, the Curator of meteorites at the Vatican and best known recently for his appearance on the Colbert Report. I know Cathy Kaveny would want me to ask how to get invited to be on the show. Cathy, I’ll see what I can do.
Look for that interview in the near future.
Spiegel today has an article on the Lefebvrite Bishop Williamson who shows no indication that he is either going to disappear from sight and hearing or to change his views on the Holocaust. An interesting point in the piece is the fear that if the Society of Pius X is reconciled to Rome, Williamson might lead a group of Lefebvrites into schism. That a split would occur in the ranks of the Lefebvrites is apparent from websites such as these:
http://www.novusordowatch.org/quo_vadis_sspx.htm
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/f029ht_SSPXRanks.htm
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/f030ht_OpenLetterSSPX.htm
And you thought The Wanderer represents the right wing in the Church!
On January 16th honorary citizenship of the City of Freising was conferred upon Pope Benedict. He gave a brief, but moving talk, replete with images of grateful memory and hope. Here is a portion of what he shared:
Today Munich airport is located at the gates of Freising. Those who land or take off from there see the towers of Freising Cathedral, they see the mons doctus, and can perhaps understand a little of its past history and of its present. Freising has always had a sweeping view of the chain of the Alps. By means of the airport it has become, in a certain sense, also global and open to the world. And yet I want to say: the Cathedral with its towers points upwards to heights that are loftier by far and very different from those we reach in airplanes; the true heights, the heights of God from whom comes the love that gives us authentic humanity. Yet the Cathedral does not only indicate the loftiness of God who forms us and shows us the way, but also indicates an expanse, and this is not only because the Cathedral embraces centuries of faith and prayer, because it contains, so to speak, the whole community of saints, of all those who went before us who believed, prayed, suffered and rejoiced. It indicates, in general, the great host of all believers of all time. Thus it also shows a vastness which goes beyond globalization, because, in diversity, even in the different cultures and origins, it gives the strength of inner unity, in other words it gives that which can unite us: the unifying power of being loved by God. Thus for me Freising also continues to point out a path.
The rest is here.
This BBC Four segment on the news about the news has been making the rounds of the Interwebs–and justifiably so. Brilliant, as they’d say across the Pond.
