I'm re-starting this thread to serve as a placeholder for stuff that I find interesting and that may be of interest to other Catholics.
This is also to avoid the further proliferation of short threads.
I may or may not respond to comments, due to the lack of time.
In the peace of the Lord Jesus,
obiterdicta
Daily Mail, 24 March 2008
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=575
With all the difficulties facing the Prime Minister, you’d think that he would be making every possible effort to avoid any further elephant traps. But no - having unaccountably constructed one for himself, he has not only fallen in but is refusing to haul himself out.
For reasons which so far have eluded everyone else, he is refusing to allow Labour MPs a free vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill and is instead imposing a three-line whip.
This has placed Roman Catholic Labour MPs in particular in serious difficulty, because the Bill contains a number of provisions - of which the most repugnant is the proposal to allow the creation of animal/human hybrid embryos — which diametrically conflict with their religious principles. As a result, three Cabinet ministers and nine other members of the Government are reportedly considering their position.
Now the row has dramatically escalated, with some exceptionally strong statements by church leaders expressing their horror at the Bill in their Easter sermons.
First, the Scottish Catholic leader Cardinal Keith O’Brien compared the hybrid proposal to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. Then other churchmen piled in, including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who called for a free vote on the Bill, and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, who called upon all faiths to object to these ‘1984-style’ proposals from ‘a militantly atheist and secularist lobby’.
As the pressure on Gordon Brown has mounted, so too has the scope for political mischief. Yesterday, the arch-Blairite Stephen Byers gave another hefty turn of the ratchet when he warned that the public would ‘look on in disbelief’ if MPs were not given a free vote on such a sensitive measure.
With the row suddenly thus turning into a direct challenge to Mr Brown’s authority and judgement, it now stands to inflict upon him a level of damage going far beyond this immediate controversy.
This is truly a most baffling state of affairs. For the issues in this Bill have previously always been treated as matters of conscience on which MPs have accordingly been given a free vote.
So why on this occasion did Mr Brown decide instead to deny a free vote and force this crisis of conscience among Labour MPs? Why, when there are so many things — such as the gathering economic crisis or the meltdown in public services —which require urgent government attention, has Mr Brown allowed himself to become enmeshed in a wholly unnecessary fight over science and religion?
Moreover, even now he’s in a hole he’s still digging. Yesterday, the Government suggested that MPs could abstain on parts of the Bill - but only if its passage through Parliament wasn’t threatened. Such MPs would therefore be allowed to uphold their religious principles only if doing so was totally useless. What an insult.
The Health Secretary Alan Johnson says MPs won’t be forced to act against their conscience or their faith. Big deal! What about allowing them to vote with their conscience?
For parts of this Bill, such as the proposal to allow scientists to combine animal eggs with human nuclei and create hybrid embryos from which stem cells can be grown for research, are simply unconscionable.
Scientists claim that the protesters are irresponsibly scaremongering, since the proposed hybrids would not be grown into ‘monsters’but would be used only as primitive cells for research. In their arrogance, such scientists fail to understand the nature of the objection. It is the idea of creating such a hybrid embryo at all that is so abhorrent.
Experimenting on human embryos is bad enough; it destroys an individual life in order to serve the interests of others and thus degrades and brutalises us all.
But creating an animal/human embryo breaks an even deeper taboo. It negates the acknowledgement of what it is to be human and, by obliterating the difference between animals and humans, destroys the concept of human uniqueness.
In the House of Lords’ debates on this Bill, it became crystal clear that the Government is indeed doing nothing less than redefining a human being. In a remarkably revealing admission, the health minister Lord Darzi said that, after some thought, the Government had decided that the hybrids in question were ‘at the human end of the spectrum’.
Just think about that for a moment and you can see how grotesque this all is. It appears that an animal/human hybrid embryo can be said to be more human or less depending on the proportion of animal material in the mix, like a Delia Smith recipe.
But you can’t be a little bit human. This is the way humanity is dehumanised. Indeed, since this Bill would allow the creation of embryos that are half animal, half human, they would have no claim to be more human than animal.
Alan Johnson cynically suggests the Bill will bring about cures for such terrible afflictions as motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s. Yes, of course, everyone would like to bring such suffering to an end. But there isn’t a shred of evidence that this will be the case.
The destruction of hundreds of thousands of human British embryos for research has not led to any such major breakthroughs - for which there is more hope from taking stem cells from adult tissue.
What’s more, only last summer the former Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, told a committee on this Bill that there was ‘no clear scientific argument’ in favour of creating such hybrids and it would be ‘a step too far’ for the public.
So why did Gordon Brown decide to take that step too far?
Part of the answer must lie in the intense pressure from scientists who, in the Godlike belief that they can eradicate disease and misery from the world, constantly push to be in the forefront of medical research regardless of any adverse consequences for society.
They find all-too-willing allies among government officials who are mesmerised by the prospect of this country leading the world in anything, and also among politicians who will cheerfully tear up any moral or ethical code going in order to satisfy public demand.
Indeed, the Bill contains many other deeply troubling proposals. It removes fatherhood from the family script altogether for some children conceived through IVF.
It allows the creation of ‘saviour siblings’, whose sole purpose in being brought into the world will be to provide parts of their organs or tissues to help another member of their family. It permits fertility clinics to create ‘designer babies’ by selecting for destruction those embryos which are marred by serious disease.
In short, it should be renamed the Dehumanising, Brutalisation and Freakology Bill.
It was based on a report by the cross-party Science and Technology Committee, which was itself profoundly split. The dissidents on the committee said the majority report was ‘unbalanced, light on ethics, goes too far in the direction of deregulation and is too dismissive of public opinion and much of the evidence’.
That’s about the sum of it. This Bill should never have been brought to Parliament in its present form. Now that it has, there must be a free vote on it.
After all, if these proposals aren’t a matter of conscience for Mr Brown, what is? Or does he see absolutely everything in terms of crude political power? If this Bill is rammed through, where does that leave that famous moral compass of his?
In pieces.
The conversion story of Magdi Cristiano Allam.
After Assimilation: The Pope Works
To Bring Back Catholic Culture
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB120848343177725119.html
Call Pope Benedict XVI a "cultural Catholic" and you're likely to get puzzled looks if not angry rejoinders. Cultural Catholics rank right down there with "cafeteria Catholics" in the opinion of those who argue that only a deep experience of Christian faith and a tight embrace of church teachings can make one authentically Catholic.
To a great extent that would also be the perspective of Benedict, whose Augustinian view of man's fallen state and need for grace, discovered in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, is almost Lutheran in its theology and evangelical in its expression. But Benedict is also, of course, a thoroughgoing Catholic, by birth and upbringing. And he recognizes that Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion, and that a strong cultural identity can cultivate faith in the present generation and pass it along to the next, as it has for centuries. ("Never!" Joseph Ratzinger once exclaimed to an interviewer who asked if he had ever thought of converting to Protestantism. The man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI had been so infused by "the Baroque atmosphere" of his native Bavaria, he said, that "from a purely psychological point of view I have never been attracted to it.")
Thus it should come as no surprise that Benedict has made recovering a distinctive Catholic culture a principal theme of his first visit to the U.S., which concludes this weekend in New York. The theme has been evident in the liturgies, which stress Latin in the prayers and Roman styling in the vestments. But it has also been underscored in Benedict's remarks, calling for stronger Catholic education from parishes to universities and for a more powerful Catholic presence in the public square as a way of "cultivating a mindset, an intellectual 'culture'," as he said at Thursday's Mass in Washington, "which is genuinely Catholic." When asked during a Wednesday encounter with the nation's bishops how to redress a "a certain quiet attrition" by Catholics who drift away from practice, Benedict lamented "the passing away of a religious culture, sometimes disparagingly referred to as a 'ghetto,' which reinforced participation and identification with the Church."
It is not only American Catholic assimilation that is to blame for the lack of a distinctive Catholic culture these days. Just as American Catholics were finally achieving the American dream, in the 1960s the church itself began de-emphasizing or even dropping rites and obligations that marked Catholic life, such as fish on Friday and even Mass on Sunday.
One recent survey showed that while 77% of American Catholics said they were proud to be Catholic, 68% also said you could be a good Catholic without going to Mass every Sunday. And 56% of Catholics under 40 say "I could be just as happy in some other church." They don't see anything wrong with gay marriage, and church teachings against birth control are a nonstarter. "Young Catholics see these specific moral teachings -- especially regarding sexuality and marriage -- as peripheral to the faith, and well-educated young Catholics see them as even more so," according to "American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church," a recent book by William V. D'Antonio. Or, as pollster John Zogby once put it: "If the church were a brand of cereal, we could find our grandchildren eating Unitarian Krispies as they get older."
In the Christian ideal, God has no grandchildren; faith must be ever new. But then how does the church encourage Catholicism as a culture while keeping the faith fresh and alive? It is an age-old question, the search for a link between the collective sense of a people and the requirement of individual sanctification. Answers have ranged from Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom to H. Richard Niebuhr's seminal work, "Christ and Culture."
For his part, Benedict seems to embrace a kind of "post-Constantinian" strategy that attempts the tricky two-step of, as the pope said, "cultivating a Catholic identity which is based not so much on externals as on a way of thinking and acting grounded in the Gospel and enriched by the Church's living tradition." Benedict's approach is so novel -- as is the ever-changing world that the age-old church now inhabits -- that it's hard to know what to call it. Vatican expert John Allen has tried out labels like "evangelical Catholicism" or "affirmative orthodoxy." Yet neither seems to encompass Benedict's goal of making an Old World religion pulse with the vitality of a New World spirituality.
Perhaps it cannot happen, or perhaps Catholic identity will emerge in some unexpected form. Maybe even papal visits and huge public liturgies like Thursday's Mass at Nationals Stadium in Washington -- events that Cardinal Ratzinger viewed with some suspicion only a few years ago -- are an important way of encouraging a kind of Catholic culture. No researcher has yet been able to quantify the impact of these papal spectaculars. But the outpouring of pride and the experience of faith they create, in ancient liturgies and modern settings, may plant seeds whose fruit we will see in future years.
Mr. Gibson is the author of "The Rule of Benedict" (HarperOne, 2006).
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB120882183951433033.html
It's not everyday that a backbencher in Congress draws international attention by insulting the spiritual leader of one in four Americans. But Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, the anti-immigrant obsessive, wasn't about to miss his moment.
Pope Benedict XVI called on U.S. bishops last week to "continue to welcome the immigrants who join your ranks today, to share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials and to help them flourish in their new home." Mr. Tancredo's response was to accuse the pontiff of "faith-based marketing" and claim that "the pope's immigration comments may have less to do with spreading the gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the church."
Mr. Tancredo – who sports T-shirts that read "America Is Full" – also cited a March 1 Wall Street Journal editorial1 to support his argument. The editorial concerned a new Pew survey on religion in the U.S. and noted that in recent decades the Catholic Church has been losing members among the native born but gaining them among the foreign born. "We'd encourage our friends on the right who want to limit immigration to consider the health of our churches," we wrote.
Our point, evidently missed by the Congressman, was that the U.S. Catholic Church has traditionally been an immigrant church, helping to settle and assimilate generations of Irish, Polish and Italian newcomers. The pope made a similar argument during his visit last week in separate remarks to U.S. educators. "Countless dedicated religious sisters, brothers and priests together with selfless parents have, through Catholic schools, helped generations of immigrants to rise from poverty and take their place in mainstream society," he said.
To Lou Dobbs, another Tancredo-like compulsive, all of this amounted to the pope "insulting our country." The CNN anchor said, "I really don't appreciate the bad manners of a guest telling me in this country and my fellow citizens what to do." You know the restrictionists have gone head-first into the fever swamps when they denounce a Christian religious leader for sounding like a Christian.
The pope welcomes immigrants because he's Catholic, not because they are. He isn't "marketing" his faith. He's practicing it.
Archbishop Dosado urges faithful: ‘Defend Church’s doctrines’
We will never be harmed by repeating this: the liturgy is eminently educational. It is even more than this; the liturgy civilizes societies and raises the arts and the culture. The reason is that it establishes a relation between men and God. And when men are close to God, they can only be better and perform better work. France has gained the beautiful titles of Eldest Daughter of the Church and educator of peoples and I think that the liturgy certainly had a great role to play in this matter. One of the pillars of the Carolingian dynasty was precisely the liturgy.
We can find an origin to this fact with the influence of the remote ancestor of this dynasty, who was Saint Arnoul (582-641), Bishop of Metz and forbearer of Charlemagne. One of his successors to the See of Metz also had a great influence on the building of the Carolingian empire, Saint Chrodegang (712-766). Pepin the Short appointed him as mediator between the kingdom and the papacy. He went to Rome where he discovered the Old Roman chant which he brought back to Austrasia. He then convinced King Pepin to officially adopt the Roman liturgy in his kingdom, which was done at the Council of Quierzy in 754. The Franks recognized in this liturgy the most exalted expression of the type of civilization they desired to promote. Metz became a high liturgical place and its numerous manuscripts are still today a precious source of information for research on the Gregorian chant.
The current engagement of the SSPX by the Holy See appears to be heading in the right directions, as asserted here:
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2008/07/castrilln-satisfied-with-sspx-answer.html
The use of Latin for the Eucharistic consecration in vernacular Novus Ordo Masses may be restored:
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2008/07/reform-in-new-mass-vernacular.html
By Hilary White
YORK, England, July 7, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "There can be no
future for Christianity in Europe without Rome," an Anglican bishop
told the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, after it was revealed that a
group of "senior" bishops from the Church of England has been in secret
negotiations with the highest levels of the Vatican to discuss the
current crisis in Anglicanism over the acceptance of homosexuality and
female bishops. Bishops from both the Church of England's "evangelical"
or protestant and "high" or "Catholic" wings are said to have been
involved in the talks that some believe may presage a mass return of
Anglicans to the Catholic fold.
Meanwhile, the news has just been released that the General Synod of
the Church of England voted tonight to accept the consecration of women
as bishops, a move that is likely to result in the exodus of a large
number of clergy and a permanent split in the Church that is the
officially established religion under British law. The ongoing
dissolution of the Church of England, of which Queen Elizabeth is the
head, may result in significant constitutional and legal changes to the
make-up of Britain. Some fear that it may result in Britain becoming
officially a secular nation.
The news comes just days before the start of the Lambeth Conference,
the once-in-ten-years gathering of Anglican bishops from around the
world set for July 16 to August 4. This year's conference is being
boycotted by many bishops over support by the liberalised western
Anglican leadership for acceptance of homosexuality. Thus far, five out
of the total of 38 Anglican primates and a large number of territorial
bishops have said they will not attend. An alternate conference of
traditionally Christian Anglican bishops and laity met in June in
Jerusalem to discuss ways forward.
Some at the General Synod had suggested the creation of "super bishops"
in an extra-geographical diocese who would have jurisdiction over those
members of the Church who refuse to accept female bishops. It is not
known now whether this arrangement will be honoured. Anglican officials
are expected to draw up legislation to bring in women bishops by 2014
at the earliest, Ruth Gledhill reports in the Times.
In anticipation of the move to consecrate female bishops, more than
1,300 clergy, including 11 serving bishops, have written to the
archbishops of Canterbury and York saying they will leave the Church of
England if women are consecrated bishops.
While women have been raised to the Anglican episcopate in the US, the
Church of England has only ordained female diocesan clergy. Three
sitting diocesan bishops have also written to the Archbishop of
Canterbury supporting the threat and two other bishops have said they
are preparing to leave the Church.
Gledhill quotes the Rev. Prebendary David Houlding, a leading
Anglo-Catholic, who said, "It's getting worse - it's going downhill
very badly."
"It's quite clear there is a pincer movement and we are being squeezed
out. We are being pushed by a particular liberal agenda and we are
going to have women bishops at the exclusion of any other view."
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, while favouring some
accommodation towards the traditionalists, said, "I am deeply unhappy
with schemes or solutions which involve the structural humiliation of
women, who are elected to the episcopate and end up haggling about the
limits to their authority."
The news that a group of "senior" Anglican bishops are in talks with
Rome during the crisis came as a surprise to representatives of the
Catholic Church of England and Wales, attending the Synod as observers.
Gledhill reported that Monsignor Andrew Faley, ecumenical officer of
the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, had "no information" that
such talks had taken place. The Telegraph reports that the Rowan
Williams was also not told of the talks that are reported to have been
with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's
highest doctrinal authority after the Pope himself.
The talks come with a backdrop of a difficult history. In 1992, when
the Church of England voted to ordain female clergy, a similar crisis
ensued in which a large number of Anglican ministers applied to Rome to
create a provision to retain the traditional Anglican style of worship
but seek communion with the See of Rome. At that time, under Pope John
Paul II, some "Anglican Use" parishes were established in the US, but
the episcopate of the Catholic Church of England and Wales obstructed
the solution. Hopes were dashed when the Catholic bishops of England
and Wales announced that converts would only be accepted individually,
not en masse, and there would be no provision made for the retention of
500 year-old Anglican liturgical traditions.
It was noted that the heavily liberalised Catholic leadership did not
relish the thought of a massive influx of doctrinally and liturgically
traditional and highly educated clergy into their midst.
But since the election of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made unprecedented
moves to reconcile traditionalists in the Catholic Church, and who was
strongly supportive of the Anglican traditionalists before his
election, hope has been revived that a path may be cleared.
Damien Thompson, a 'blogger for the Telegraph and editor-in-chief of
the Catholic Herald, wrote, "The Pope's closest advisers are not in a
mood to allow the bishops the same freedom this time. They are already
cross at the poor English response to the Motu Proprio liberating the
Latin liturgy - and have conveyed their displeasure to the relevant
bishops in no uncertain terms."
"The Anglican traditionalists know that they cannot trust a Catholic
bishop not to shop them to Rowan Williams. So the liberal RC hierarchy
has been - quite properly - kept in the dark."
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08070717.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4492221.ece
On the growing popularity of the Extraordinary Form of the Sacred Liturgy amongst the clergy in England.