Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Published in the current issue, Neuroscience Letters has revealed that “mystical experiences appear to involve a number of brain regions and systems that normally control a variety of functions, including self-consciousness, emotion and body representation”.

The results showed that a dozen different regions of the brain were activated when the nuns relived a mystical experience. The finding contradicts previous research that suggested that a specific brain region may be designed for communication with God.

Huh, if the nuns are asked to recall an experience, wouldn’t this be a study to detect an area related to memory? How stupid, everyone knows that only a Divinimeter can detect the God spot!

Article by Catholic New Service:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — An Italian exorcist said demonic influence is strong in today’s world, affecting individuals and sometimes entire societies. While it is very rare for a person to be possessed by a demon, history reveals some likely examples — including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, said Pauline Father Gabriele Amorth.

Father Amorth, who works as an exorcist in the Diocese of Rome, made the comments in an interview with Vatican Radio Aug. 27. Father Amorth said every culture in history has shown an awareness of the existence of evil spirits.

With the Bible, he said, these spirits were identified as rebellious angels who “tempt man to evil out of hatred for God.” “The devil can possess not only individuals but also entire groups and populations.

For example, I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed by the devil,” he said. “If one thinks of what was committed by people like Stalin or Hitler, certainly they were possessed by the devil. This is seen in their actions, in their behavior and in the horrors they committed,” he said. “Therefore, society also needs to be defended against the devil,” he said.

Father Amorth said he thought one reason why the devil’s influence was high today is that Christian faith has weakened, replaced in many cases by superstition and an interest in the occult, which he said “open the way to demonic influences.”

He said the church teaches that the devil is a pure spirit; he is not seen, but his effects can be seen, he said. Exorcism, he said, is a prayer made in the name of the church to liberate people stricken by the devil or by his evil influences.

Father Amorth gained notoriety in 2000 when he revealed that Pope John Paul II had performed an impromptu exorcism on a young woman who flew into an apparent rage at the end of a general audience at the Vatican. In 1999, the Vatican issued a revised Rite of Exorcism, cautioning that cases of actual possession by devils were probably very rare.

The church also has emphasized that before an exorcism is performed, it is important to make certain one is dealing with the devil and not a psychological or other illness.

Last week when it was announced that Fr. Coyne had been replaced as director of the Vatican Observatory, the Daily Mail was all a flutter with the speculation that he was “sacked” because he went afoul of Benedict’s position on Intelligent Design.

Their article was quite ridiculous, frankly. They claim that Benedict favors Intelligent Design over Evolution and this was the source of Coyne’s “sacking.” I suppose they ought to be granted some allowance because if they listened to Fr. Coyne’s criticism of Cardinal Schönborn’s NYT’s article as their only education on the topic, perhaps their confusion is understandable (see my analysis of Fr. Coyne’s confusing comments from his talk in Palm Beach in January of this year).

If Fr. Coyne was removed for cause, I would suspect it is more because he publicly seemed to espouse at least Deism if not a Process philosophy (again see my above linked analysis). However, there is an article in an English language, Italian news source that is claiming that Fr. Coyne requested to be replaced as he battles cancer.

Well, the U.K. Guardian is continuing to fan the flames of confusion. They are claiming:

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of “intelligent design” taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

They cite Cardinal Schönborn’s talk at a conference in Rimini (see CNS news story) recently in which he proposed an open debate on Darwin. However, the point is still very much lost on the popular media and on many Catholic intellectuals to boot.

Cardinal Schönborn has been trying to uncover the scientistic thinking that has captured Western thought in his entry into this issue. He is criticizing the presumption that a Baconian type methodology is necessary to detect design in nature. This thinking shows the widespread capitulation to the reduction of knowledge to solely that which is “scientific” that has infected academic thinking since at least Hume. Now popular thinking accedes to this gnostic attitude and assumes if it does not come from a “priest” of science then it falls into the category of opinion (and even in this realm a scientist’s opinion is better than anyone else’s regardless of the other’s expertise or the scientist’s lack thereof).

What the Cardinal, and I assume Benedict, wish to do is to restore speculative knowledge to the realm of public discourse. This is also the mission of the Institute for the Study of Nature. They all recognize that, in general, modern thinkers have something of an emaciated view of reality.

It is clear that when orthodox Catholic scientists reject the idea of formal causality as an active principle then they have succumbed to a reductionist view of reality. In other words, the view that an entity is nothing but the sum of its parts. If the Aristotelian form is not an active principle then it is just the entity’s cognitive content to be extracted. If it is simply a passive description of the entity it “informs” then perhaps all knowledge does belong to purview of modern science and no one has anything valid to say about the material world if they don’t have a Ph.D. in some field of “hard” science. There are philosophical and theological difficulties with this view that we have discussed here before.

I look forward to these efforts to reframe the creation - design debate in an auspiciously Catholic context where it is no longer one of biblical exegesis vs. materialistic atheism under a thin veneer of Darwinian theory. Rather, it will be a recovery of classical tools of thought that can show how the common sense that all humans possess can see and know of God’s handiwork in nature by apprehending its form, without having to verify it with mathematical calculations and complex theoretical models.

“C-38, the search for marriage” unlike any other media treatment of subject of same-sex marriage. Click the link to watch trailers of the film. (interesting follow up question!)

“C-38” is unlikely to have any influence on those with fixed, ideological agendas or those who are emotionally incapable of calm, respectful discussion and reflection. A large portion of the public, however, is far more open and would certainly benefit from seeing the film.

The treatment is so balanced that for the first 20 minutes viewers are likely to question just what side this production is on. Actually, Spoeth told LifeSiteNews, he did not want it to be seen as “preaching” or favoring one side or another. He says “we went out of our way to find the strongest voices on both sides of he issue”.

H/T LifeSite.

A european goalie was “cautioned” (given a criminal record), over making the sign of the cross before the start of the second half of a soccer game, which was  that thought to be a, “breach of the peace” for “provoking alarm and crowd trouble”. in my opinion (and others), what was orginally a controversy over a religious gesture, has all of a sudden become more of a strategic positioning of words to get out of an embarrasing situation . I have enough of a conspiracy driven paranoia to think this is a case of re-evaluation of a bad move gone worse.

The Crown Office categorically denied suggestions that the action against the Polish international had anything to do with making the sign of the cross – universally accepted as a gesture of religious reverence. It said it was “other gestures” understood to be directed at Rangers fans after his crossing ritual which were seen to be offensive.

The clarification came as politicians across the spectrum feared Scotland would become a laughing stock for seeing the sign of the cross as unacceptable.

Why the secret over the gesture?

“This is not about him crossing himself. It is to do with the following gestures that he made to the crowd. The whole thing has been misconstrued.”

But it said it would not say what the other gestures were because of a “duty of care” to the Celtic player who would not be able to defend the allegation in a court of law.(huh?)

In a statement, the Crown Office said it had been in the “public interest” to take action against Boruc.

Prosecutors had not seen (his) gestures because it was not caught on camera, but they relied on witness statements and footage of the crowd’s response.

In summary, this whole thing centers around, “the low-life Neanderthals who made the complaint after breaking off from their repertoire of anti-Catholic bile and it is an absolute outrage that the police and Crown Office have pandered to their prejudices.”

source

The three Catholic men admitted their involvement in the Christian-Muslim violence where approximately 1,000 people died in a region of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. These Christian men were the only ones charged with a crime, despide the “massive” amount of Muslims Jihadist who participated in a campaign of violence and murder against christians.

“One of the most amazing aspects of this case is that in attacks from 1998 to 2003, there were approximately 10,000 Christians murdered, 1,000 churches burned down and 80,000 homes burned down. In that orgy of violence directed against Christians, the only individuals the government chose to convict were these three [Christian] men. This is quite alarming especially considering all the indications that local and regional government officials aided and abetted these attacks against Christians.”

The fear (and support) of the Muslim “Laskar Jihad” movement who attacked Christian villages and vowed to “to sweep ALL christians out of the area”, is evident of the injustice and bigotry against Christians who are made to be the scapegoats or “fall guys” for the murdering Islamic participants.

Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, had noted in an Aug. 11 news release that the Indonesian government “views the executions of these Christians as a way to balance justice — very important in Indonesian society.”

International Christian Concern had stated, “While these men [Tibo, Riwu and da Silva] have admitted their involvement in the conflict, they were the only ones charged in a conflict in which massive numbers of Muslims participated…. This is a glaring injustice and hints of a massive coverup by the Indonesian government.”

*Great analysis of this story Nancy Reyes at the Finestkind Clinic and fish market *

SOURCE

From the director who brought Live Flesh (film about a women who committs adultery because she is not sexually “satisfied” by handicapped husband) to the big screen, will now bring St. Teresa of Ávila to theaters in Teresa: Death and Life.

Film-makers don’t do spirituality as easily as sexuality and, in exploring the saint’s sex life, they find themselves accused of treading sacrilegiously.

The film was denounced by Benedicta Ward, a nun and Reader in the History of Christian Spirituality in the Theology Faculty at Oxford University, who wrote the introduction to a recent edition of the saint’s celebrated work, Life.

On being told about the film’s content, she said: “The stress on her virginity and her sexuality are entirely modern interests — as if she were living now. That’s not fair. She is the greatest of the mystics. She has visions and writes about them and analyses them in an extraordinary way.”

On the director’s opinion on women and the Catholic Church:

“So far, they’ve only offered two models to women — The Virgin Mother, which, in my opinion, is an aberration and quite harmful to women, and the redeemed whore symbolised by Mary Magdalene. These role models worry me. The Church hasn’t been able to find a better explanation for women within the context of our relationship with God.”

Source

Chris over at Papa Familias linked to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune (from a Boston Globe article). This is article is frightening if these anecdotal statements are representative of this teenage population. The article surveys views of Boston area, African-American teens on their views of marriage. Based upon family experience and the view they get from the media, teens in this survey are rejecting marriage because as they see it, marriage always ending in a disaster. Here are some snipettes:

[snip]

“I’m not looking forward to marriage,” says Nakeeda Burns, a 17-year-old resident of Revere, and daughter of a single mother, “and I don’t think we [people in general] should be married because I see how other marriages ended up in my family and on television. It’s always a disaster.”

[snip]

“All of my friends who are married, they tell me not to get married,” says Anderson Felix, 17, of Dorchester. “`Wifey is going to keep you on lock.’ `Everywhere you go, she’ll call you every five minutes.’ I won’t be able to deal with that.”

[snip]

“I don’t know anyone who’s married, or anybody who is married and stayed married,” says Marshall, a 15-year-old from Dorchester. …”When I think of `married,’” Marshall adds, “[I think] `divorce,’ first word.”

[snip]

Burns admits she has come to some of her conclusions from watching television. “They’re fighting for the littlest reasons,” Burns says of the people on “Divorce Court.”

Healthy marriages are the linchpin to healthy family life and a vibrant society. It is no surprise that communities in which a small percentage of children are able grow up with both of their biological parents in a stable household, are going to experience high rates of out of wedlock births among the girls and crime among the boys.

It is no surprise that these kids are going to reject an institution that is caricatured in the media. In addition to this, they are fed a cultural message that happiness is attained by self indulgence and they intuit marriage is more about self giving, it must be the antithesis of happiness. What is going to change these kids’ minds? I believe that the message of Christian love and a Christo-centric anthropology of fulfillment through self giving is the only way out of this morass. Unfortunately, the catalyst to get most people to listen to the message often requires something of an earth shaking catastrophe. Societal implosion would seem to fit this description…

What if I say the words…… “sex abuse scandal”, don’t stop to think, ….quickly, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?…Catholic Church, right? (not valid if you’re in the habit of reading the titles of articles first) Not that there is any excuse for the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church, but if the “media’s” agenda is pure (i.e. justice and the protection of children), why is there such an imbalanced focus on Catholic priests and The Church? What about the sex abuse being done by others, are non-catholic kids just along for the ride, being molested by pedophile teachers? The facts speak so loudly, they (agenda driven media) need not take their sanctimoniousness feet out of their mouths to explain it. Here are some highpoints of the CBS article:

In the face of the evidence of a widespread epidemic of abuse fed by a new morality that winks at child molestation, why is the Church the only institution under the microscope?

If the suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey were a priest, there would be a fresh outcry about a decades-long cover-up in the Catholic Church.

Any institution that has allowed children to be harmed by predators deserves to be taken to task for it. No institution should get a pass. And no profession should get a pass. Not preachers, not priests — not even teachers.

“[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a “Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up” and by asking “Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?” No, they didn’t. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.

The federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

During the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning PAST ALLEGATIONS (of which many are made against innocent priests) . During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools.

The 2002 Department of Education report estimated that from 6 percent to 10 percent of all students in public schools would be victims of abuse before graduation — a staggering statistic. Yet, outside the Catholic Church, the reaction is increasingly accommodation instead of outrage.

This story, borrowed from the article in the National Review, written by Tom Hoopes, the editor of the National Catholic Register. I am just shocked that CBS picked it up on their website. Not that I enjoy pointing this out, BUT if the hypocritical media cared in the least for the welfare of children, we wouldn’t have a 500:1 ratio of stories on the Catholic sex scandal, when kids in public schools have a 100 times more chance of being molested by a pedo-teacher. If the public school system would spend less time handing out condoms and instructing kids on how to have sex, and spend more time cleaning up their teacher pedophile scandal problem, the children would be better served. Amen.

Mercatornet.com ran an interview recently with Anne Manne, the author of Motherhood which is a book exploring the challenges of modern motherhood, about the status of studies done on children in long term daycare. Here are some interesting snippets:

[snip]

MercatorNet: What basically is wrong with childcare centres?

Anne Manne: The mantra is always that as long as it is “high quality” then all will be well. Yet “quality” is extraordinarily hard to achieve. For example , we now know the centrality of a secure attachment to the primary caregiver, and to any substitute caregivers. And we know that a secure attachment is fostered by “contingently sensitive caretaking”, that is, responding to a baby’s need promptly and calmly, really knowing this particular baby’s rhythms and preferences, not leaving them to cry for long periods. Yet even in the best centres, how do you achieve that with, as we have in Australia, ratios of one caregiver to five babies! A mother with quintuplets would get more support! And in such conditions, as in the United Sates and Britain, you have a very high turnover of caregivers, and again, how do you promote a secure attachment when caregivers leave all the time?

Then there is the kind of “flatness” of a disengaged emotional style which seems common. We had a series of reports in Australia that illustrate the problem. Researchers in three states investigated what they call joint attention sequences. This involves the sort of thing parents are doing all the time — you’re with your baby and you follow their eye to an object and say, “Oh, would you like that? Shall I get the yellow teddy bear down? Shall we look at this storybook together?” and so on. So it’s a shared intimate moment when the attachment of the infant to the mother is reinforced but also when learning takes place and the child’s world is expanded.

When they looked in childcare centres they found almost none of this. Almost none. A baby or toddler would make a bid for attention to enter one of these sequences and would rarely be responded to. Maybe they’d have one turn — the caregiver would say something and that would be the end of it.

[snip]

MercatorNet: Intuitions are debatable, but what about science? What are the studies telling us about the effects of daycare?

Anne Manne: There are two sorts of studies. Longitudinal studies, which look at the long-term emotional and behavioural outcomes, then a newer group of studies which measure the stress hormone, cortisol, in children in daycare.

In the United States, the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) has a long-running study which we need to pay careful attention to. It has shown that, at kindergarten age, children who had already spent long hours in daycare showed much stronger aggression and related traits — really problematic behaviour.

Those results came out in 2001 and there was a huge furore about it. It was not what the researchers themselves had hoped to find and there are ongoing attempts to sanitise the data. All the same, there have been two studies that have come out in Britain and another in Northern Ireland, another in California, all of which show the same type of antisocial and worried behaviour among children who have been in long daycare — under two years of age, that is.

Then there are the cortisol studies, which measure a hormone related to stress. For a child at home, the normal pattern is for cortisol to be high in the morning and decrease throughout the day. But even in very high quality daycare centres, studies have shown that cortisol levels in some children stay high or even increase as the day goes on. Even allowing for variables like temperament, daycare itself seems to have this effect.

MercatorNet: Is anyone paying attention to this evidence?

Anne Manne: Not enough. In the NICHD study the risk of negative behaviour increased from 6 per cent of children in daycare for less than 10 hours, to about 18 per cent of those experiencing the longest hours. Perhaps that doesn’t seem much, but it’s massively higher than the risk of a clot for women having hormone replacement therapy — and look how seriously we take that.

The response to the cortisol studies can be similar. No-one would say to an adult, “Look, if you’re stressed and miserable for a year or two, don’t worry. Long-term you’ll be fine.” But a certain corruption has crept into our attitude to the child, who can be seen as an investment unit where only the long-term outcomes really matter.

Don’t we have an obligation to consider their happiness and wellbeing in the here and now? Parents should have the confidence to say, “My baby is happy here with me, and this is the way we’re doing it.” And be able to be supported by state policy — without necessarily penalising other parents who are doing this differently.

Our Western culture has come to reduce motherhood to a biological function that can be accomplished by anyone. Thus, it devalues the irreplaceable nuturing love that only a mother can give to her baby and places a generation of children at risk. Motherhood is the communication of love from one person to another. It goes much deeper than the mechanics of changing a diaper or giving a bottle. The love of a mother for her child has specific physiological and spiritual implications for her baby’s personal development.

As a society we need to stop extolling the virtues of work outside the home as the source of self-fulfillment. It is bad enough that most father’s are taken away for so long each day. From the perspective of a healthy society, healthy family life is much more important than another productive body in the work force. From the perspective of the significance of a human life, it ought to be unthinkable that a higher economic lifestyle, increased productivity, or even aspirations of self-fulfillment (as mistaken as this thinking might be) should come before the welfare of a child.

Society needs to rethink it’s priorities and, as John Paul the Great says, create social structures that would ensure that women are not penalized in their careers for taking time out to care for their children during their formative years.

Yale Ob/gyn residents must undergo abortion training as part of a required residency program established by Planned Parenthood’s Connecticut branch (PPC). The second year residents must complete two four-week rotations with PPC to learn how to vacuum suction, medical abortions, and other “Family Planning/Ambulatory Surgery.”

Residents cannot opt out of learning the theoretical applications of the program, including techniques related to still-birth, miscarriage, and complications related to abortion. Students also cannot opt out of performing ultrasounds on women intending to have abortions.

PPC established the course last year as part a frantic campaign to replace the imploding and aging population of abortionists, whose numbers have declined 37% since the 1980s. Although worried about their population decline, PPC seems oddly determined to spread their abortion practices deeper into the heartland of the United States claiming studies indicate 87% of US counties and 97% of rural counties have no abortionists.

Dr. Men-Jean Lee, the program director at Yale University Medical School is supportive of the experience and training the residents are receiving at PPC and are especially happy with the number of patients the residents see.

My thoughts: Being an abortionist is not a career choice, but a diabolical ambition. Seriously, do you think a real physician would find any value in the abortion clinical rotation? I doubt anybody who has the aspiration to help bring life into the world could live with the images of tiny babies who were torn apart, by their own hands. I wonder if those with ambitions to be an abortionist are required to do a rotation with women who are tormented by their decision to have an abortion? you know, to see the rest of the carnage they will cause by their own hands

LifeSite

The Parents Television Council released it’s annual “Top Ten Best and Worst Advertisers” which ranks advertisers according to how frequently they sponsor family-oriented television shows or those containing sexually graphic, violent or profane material.

The PTC’s list of the Top Ten Best and Worst Advertisers is based on each company’s prime time network television ad buys between October 2005 and May 2006. Each company listed purchased at least 25 ads on prime time broadcast programs. Companies with the most ads on PTC-rated green lighted shows were ranked the best, and those with the most ads on PTC-rated red lighted shows were ranked the worst.

The 2006 Top Ten Best and Worst Advertisers are:

BEST

1. Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.

2. The Campbell Soup Company

3. The Walt Disney Company

4. The Ford Motor Company

5. Cingular Wireless

6. Altria Group [Parent company of Kraft Foods, Post Cereals, Jell-O desserts, Maxwell House coffees, Oscar Mayer foods, Miracle Whip, DiGiorno, Stove Top Stuffing, Crystal Light drink mixes, Kool-Aid, Cool Whip, Minute Rice, Shake ‘n Bake, Country Time drink mixes, Altoids]

7. DreamWorks

8. Shering-Plough Corp. [Products include: Claritin, Dr. Scholls, Nasonex]

9. Darden Restaurants, Inc. [Parent company of Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Bahama Breeze, Smokey Bones BBQ]

10. Sears Holdings Corp.

WORST

1. General Motors Corp.

2. Toyota Motor Corp.

3. Volkswagen

4. Daimler Chrysler

5. Target Corp.

6. GlaxoSmithKline [Products include: Zyban, Valtrex, Flonase, Imitrex]

7. Nissan Motors

8. American Express Inc.

9. Apple Computers Inc.

10. Circuit City Stores

I was reading a book recently, not by choice by the way, that seems to epitomize the Americanist mindset of those who fashion themselves as “liberal” or “progressive” Catholics. I do not generally like to use these terms but in this case it seems that perhaps that with their close association to modern political liberalism, this might be warranted.

The book was Roman Catholicism by Chester Gillis. Gillis is the chair of the theology department at Georgetown University and popular talking head for the news media. Gillis was born in the U.S. in 1951. That would make him about 11 when Vatican II started so he experienced the Church in the U.S. before and after the Council. If one looks up his CV he sees that his first degrees are ecclesiastical degrees from the University of Louvain in Belgium, perhaps suggesting that he was a seminarian at one time.

Gillis’s book seems aimed at convincing his readers of his view of the Church, which is an ever changing plurality of views. To this end, Gillis employs a not so clever use of ample pejorative adjectives for what he calls “conservative” Catholicism and at least neutral and often positive (for American ears anyway) adjectives for “liberal” Catholics.

Gillis tries to describe Catholics in the U.S. by dividing us up into five groups. It is most telling what concept he uses in defining these groups. It is based upon attitudes toward rules. Conservatives are the “by the rules Catholics.” Here he analyzes their motivations. For “conservative” motivations we get fear of hell or social ostracism, and in what one gets the sense was a concession to comments from his reviewers, he adds a parenthetical to his other possible motivation that these folks probably are unable to think for themselves (which he admits is less likely but possible). The possibility that these folks could actually believe in truth does not seem to occur to him.

For his second category, which I would suggest is where he would put himself, is the “bend and break the rules Catholics.” What are these folks motivations? Of course, we get the distorted Lonerganianism that professes that personal experience can tell one that the Church is wrong. And of course the other reason, conscience tells them they must follow their own way rather than the pope’s. It does not occur to him that a possibility might be that some of these folks also cannot think for themselves and so are led around by the nose by what the culture tells them. The other three categories are variations on the theme of rules (don’t pertain to me, don’t know, ignore).

Now it is fair to say that legalism is the view that Gillis had of Catholicism as he was growing up. Legalism is a perennial problem from the perspective of religious moralism. We see it as a problem with the Pharisees in the New Testament but this thinking was overturned by the Gospel. Jesus showed us that we need to view the Gospel message not as an overturning of the Ten Commandments but as the fulfillment of them. There are rules but they are guidance toward our perfection. They are not limitations of freedom but the only way to true freedom. The early Church understood this but in the West, at least, Roman legalism soon crept back into common thinking.

Legalism was formally instituted into Christian thought with the Reformers when Martin Luther and John Calvin turn God’s justice into a court room. We claim our freedom from the law and our justification by faith. When we proclaim our faith we are imputed justice. It is a legal transaction and can be nothing more, else something more than faith might be required or we might be able to lose our justification. Luther’s Law and Gospel theology (abetted by his unwitting appropriation of Ockhamist Nominalism), which he pitted as oppositions to one another, seems to have pointed the way to an Enlightenment dichotomy between freedom and law. This cultural mindset was dominant when John Locke attempted to correct the pessimistic errors of the Hobbesian Social Contract. Locke rejected man’s natural state as one of barbarism but he still accepted Hobbes’s view that government/law was a compromise between individualistic freedom and practical necessity.

American culture inherited this Reformed legalism modified by Enlightenment legalism. We generally have a negative view of law. We see them as limits to personal freedom that must be kept to an absolute minimum. In our American individualism (or individualism on steroids), it is becoming more and more common place for the average person to consider laws as good for others but not generally applicable to oneself (unless there is a good chance that he will be punished for transgressing them). Add into this mix, postmodern thought that tells us that freedom, the will, is all there really is to life and we can understand what Gillis is trying to do in his book. He is trying to show his readers how un-American that “conservative” Catholicism really is.

Gillis continually portrays throughout the book, Magisterial teaching as a conflict between the pope’s personal desire for control and power over Catholics and the latter’s freedom to follow their consciences and personal experiences. That is however, unless the topic is Catholics who reject Church teachings/disciplines with which he agrees. For example, he chastises Traditionalists who “defy Vatican II” with “illicit” Tridentine liturgies. He takes care to point out that social justice issues are clear Catholic teachings that can be seen in magisterial documents. Of course, when he disagrees the teachings are not infallible, so they are just disciplines, are still debated by theologians, or are still reformable in some way.

In the end, for Gillis the Church is always changing and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Catholics will never accept the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception and (he tries to say discipline on) women’s ordination (his two favorite topics). We are just a big divided, pluralistic family. We could be a happy family if only those “conservative” Catholics would not try to claim that Catholics cannot be considered to be faithful if they are disobedient to the Magisterium. There is no one type of Catholic and there is no authentic Catholic teaching (except for those with which he happens to agree).

Gillis is still living in pre-Vatican II days. He still suffers from the legalism that he likes to project upon Catholic teaching. He does not want to see that freedom is made for personal perfection, but that law is necessary to direct that freedom toward truth. He seems to be oblivious to the fact that his erroneous propositions on such things as birth control, homosexual behavior and natural fornication deprive those who succumb to these types of temptations, the perfection they need to pursue if they are truly to be happy.

While he may have heard that the human person is made to given himself away, he does not recognize the implications. It is only in giving himself totally to God and surrendering in obedience to Him and so to His visible Church, that we will find out who we are and achieve who we were meant to be. Freedom is for perfection, not for license. Unity in the Church will not be achieved through surrendering the truth to the tyrants of relativism (experience and unformed conscience) but through a humble acceptance that we are not our own masters. Happiness begins when we understand and accept that Church teaching is not arbitrary “law” but divine acts of love mediated by the visible manifestation of the prolongation of the Incarnation–the Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, this is largely the type of book one finds in this genre. Are there any Catholic historians out there that might want to write a critical and fair book on U.S. Catholic history and the U.S. Catholic experience?

Don’t blame it all on the same-sex marriage activists, it’s the immature and self centered attitudes and actions of us “heteros” towards marriage that has been the catalyst for opening the door for same-sex marriage.

A pro-family researcher feels heterosexuals must share the blame for the debate over same-sex “marriage” taking place in America today. Dr. Stephen Baskerville says heterosexuals need to look at the way they have treated marriage before blaming the same-sex marriage push on homosexual activists.

“It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it,” Baskerville contends. He says many homosexual activists will admit that it is because marriage today is taken so lightly — and because it appears to pose no barrier to promiscuity — that the institution of marriage has become attractive to those who engage in the often promiscuous homosexual lifestyle.

Don’t forget the contraceptive mentality of sterilization and birth control, which fits right into the same-sex marriage arguement as well. Seriously, how much more could we heteros have done to “muddy the waters”, and set the table for the same-sex marriage advocates?

 Confession in a strip club makes just as much sense as an AA meeting serving alcohol at it’s meeting. Allegedly, if the owner of a strip club didn’t allow the confession booth to be installed, “they’d” organize a citywide boycott and would work to get the club’s liquor license suspended. Similar scenes have occurred throughout the city. Manned by local priests, the booths cater to both the male customers and the female strippers.

According to a news report out of Boston, the Catholic Church in that city has begun installing confessionals in strip joints to see if patrons confess immediately after they digress. It’s a peek and seek forgiveness kind of thing.

Why would confession be offered in such a scandalous place, where the occasion of sin is right before the eyes? Does anyone know if this is even true?

O.k., now this is a “must read” for we hyperactive Americans. Zenit has a translation of B16’s Angelus address on St. Bernard that he gave on Sunday. St. Bernard was a master mystic and I think that Benedict is of the same cloth. Here is the essence of the address:

[snip]

St. Bernard speaks of this among other things in his brief but consistent “Liber de diligendo Deo” (Book on the Love of God). He has another writing that I would like to point out, the “De Consideratione,” a brief document addressed to Pope Eugene III. The dominant theme of this book, extremely personal, is the importance of interior recollection — and he said this to a Pope — an essential element of piety.

It is necessary to pay attention to the dangers of excessive activity, regardless of one’s condition and occupation, observes the saint, because — as he said to the Pope of that time, and to all Popes and to all of us — numerous occupations often lead to “hardness of heart,” “they are no more than suffering for the spirit, loss of intelligence and dispersion of grace” (II, 3).

This admonition is valid for all kinds of occupations, including those inherent to the governance of the Church. The message that, in this connection, Bernard addresses to the Pontiff, who had been his disciple at Clairvaux, is provocative: “See where these accursed occupations can lead you, if you continue to lose yourself in them — without leaving anything of yourself for yourself” (ibid).

How useful for us also is this call to the primacy of prayer! May St. Bernard, who was able to harmonize the monk’s aspiration for solitude and the tranquility of the cloister with the urgency of important and complex missions in the service of the Church, help us to concretize it in our lives, in our circumstances and possibilities.

We entrust this difficult desire to find a balance between interiority and necessary work to the intercession of the Virgin, whom he loved from his childhood with tender and filial devotion, to the point of meriting the title of “Marian Doctor.”

Let us invoke her so that she will obtain authentic and lasting peace for the whole world. In a famous address, St. Bernard compares Mary with the star that seafarers look to so as not to lose their way.

He wrote these famous words: “Whoever you are that perceive yourself during this mortal existence to be rather drifting in treacherous waters, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, than walking on firm ground, turn not away your eyes from the splendor of this guiding star, unless thou wish to be submerged by the storm. … Look at the star, call upon Mary. … With her for guide, you shall not go astray, while invoking her, you shall never lose heart … if she walks before you, you shall not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you shall reach the goal,” (”Homilia super Missus est,” II, 17).

Hardness of heart from too much activity and not enough quiet prayer.  I suspect most of us can identify with this. Americans especially are hyperactive, even when they are being couch potatos, they are being sense stimulated (though into a passively receptive state). Authentic Benedictine spirituality can be a cure for this hard heartedness.

The August edition of a magazine that is supposed to focus on sustaining the planet, and targets people who are upset with what is happening in the world is having it’s latest issue yanked from the library shelves because if it’s pornographic content.

HopeDance magazine often has an environmental and/or political focus and Banner says the next issue, now in preparation, will deal with global warming and oil.

The pulblisher claims that it is “packed with articles that are fresh, disturbing, funny, probing at the unusual, and alive with what it means to have a body embedded with desire and spiritual yearning dancing together in its beautiful chorus called humanity.

The magazine include titles such as The Holy Whore: A Womens Gateway to Power, Lustful and Orgasmic Farming, Liberating the Caged Female Human Animal’s Sexuality, and Public Masturbator Blues.

The mystery beast is a creature called a dog.

The creature had been blamed for a series of attacks on dogs and was the subject of local legend. “It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget,” she told the paper. “We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I seems that the National Catholic Reporter took issue with the Catholic League’s advertisement in the New York Times on fourth anniversary of the “sex abuse crisis.” In the advertisement the Catholic League summarized the findings of the original John Jay study and the recent supplement that was released. NCR accused them of “spinning” the data to minimize the issue. The Catholic League responded recently with some facts that are worth repeating:

On p. 29 of the 2005 annual Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, it says that 81 percent of the victims were male and that 14 percent were younger than age 10 when the abuse began. On p. 43 of the John Jay Supplementary Data Analysis that accompanies the audit, it defines pedophile priests as those who began their abuse when their victims were 10 or less. Now if NCR wants to conclude from this data that homosexual priests do not account for most of the abuse, then it needs to explain itself.

Similarly, the Catholic News Service coverage of the John Jay report that studied the years 1950-2002 said that “An overwhelming majority of the victims, 81 percent, were males,” and that “A majority of the victims were post-pubescent adolescents with a small percentage of the priests accused of abusing children who had not reached puberty.”

Indeed, in the National Review Board’s 2004 report, it said that “we must call attention to the homosexual behavior that characterized the vast majority of the cases of abuse observed in recent years.” No wonder board member Dr. Paul McHugh, a former psychiatrist-in-chief at John Hopkins Hospital, said last year that “This behavior was homosexual predation on American Catholic youth, yet it’s not being discussed.” (My emphasis.)

We know why the homosexual connection is not being discussed—it’s politically incorrect to mention it. Even the most recent John Jay report tries to cover-up this reality: it mentions the word pedophile 14 times, ephebophile 12 times, but never once does it mention homosexual. It should be noted that the term ephebophilia, meaning sex with postpubescent adolescents, is rarely used by experts outside the Catholic Church, has no clinical standing and is never used to refer to heterosexual acts.

Our ad also says that “it is estimated that the rate of sexual abuse of public school students is more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” The editorial brands this as “more spin,” claiming that “Sexual abuse of students by teachers, coaches and school employees is an area worthy of investigation, but virtually no serious research on the topic has been carried out.”

Apparently, NCR is unaware of the report, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” that was published in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Education. The report, authored by Dr. Charol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University, provides valuable insight into the problem. It was her conclusion that nearly 10 percent of American students are the victims of sexual misconduct by public school employees each year. And it was Dr. Shakeshaft who told Education Week that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

[snip]

Finally, the editorial admits that while our ad correctly cites the figures of priestly sexual abuse found in the bishops’ audit, “It frequently takes years for those abuse victims to come forward.” Wrong again. On p. 13 of the John Jay supplementary report, it says that “reporting patterns have stabilized over the last decade” and that “the decrease in sexual abuse cases [cited in the report] is a true representation of the overall phenomenon.” Looks like NCR has paid too much attention to Dr. Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea. In 2003, she said, “You will see some kind of a bubble [in the figures] in 2005, when the people who were abused in the 1990s come forward.” As I said at the time, “It remains to be seen whether her bubble will burst in 2006 when 2005 turns out to be a bust.”

Unfortunately, the article also points out that the League is against an all out ban on homosexuals for the priesthood for the simple reason that the President knows “too many good homosexual priests.” I am not sure what he means by this but hopefully it is not at odds with last year’s guidance for seminary admissions from the Congregation for Catholic Education. The term “homosexual” is problematic in itself because it is unenlightening and paints all degrees of SSA as one. I am not sure why one would call someone who does not have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” a homosexual. I do wish they would use other more meaningful terms.

In any case, admission to the priesthood is not about competence but about being called by God to represent Christ as Bridegroom. Certainly those already ordained (but who might not have been today) who are able to live a chaste and healthy life as a priest should not be removed. In fact, they should be loved and supported for the heroic witness they provide. This policy says nothing about their personal worth nor about their competence any more than it would say anything about someone denied entry because they suffer from, say, cancer. There is no reason any priest now serving faithfully, who suffers from SSA, should assume that they have anything other than a profound appreciation from the Church for their ministry. Only those who mistake it as part of their ontology are likely to make this error.

However, the guidance is clear and based upon sound anthropology. It seems to me that the guidance is saying that only those who have slight SSA tendencies that the person can master in stressful situations and who otherwise has a normal sexual orientation ought to be considered (cautiously) as possible seminarian candidates.

So I give the League a “good on ya” and a question mark for their response.

I am sure that discussions in blogdom have probably exhausted this topic, but as I am ignorant of them I will throw my own two cents into what no doubt is an already entropy maximized mix. I recall as a youngster the first time I was asked to fill out a form that identified my religious preference; for what I do not recall. I did not see anything on the form that said Catholic, so I asked my mom. She pointed to the “Roman Catholic” preference and said that was what some people called us.

I was catechized in the time frame that the Baltimore Catechism was quickly being phased out, replaced by the “Jesus loves you just as you are…kumbaya, guitar singing, touchy-feely, CCD. What I mean is that what I knew of my faith was not much. I did not think much more about it then and just saw “Roman Catholic” as another way of saying “Catholic.”

Shortly after I started learning my faith, at an age that used to be considered over the hill by some, I recall happening upon an article about the history of the term “Roman Catholic” and an argument that it was a term that Catholics ought to reject. Here are the arguments as best I can recall:

1. The term arises from the polemics of post-Reformation Europe and was equated with “popish” and “romish” epithets and intended to reject the claim that the Catholic Church was the universal Church founded by Christ. Thus, Catholics using the terms continue to abet the notion that the Catholic Church is just one of many (~33,000) denominations. See here for a history of the term.
2. The official name of the Church is the Catholic Church in which “Catholic” is both part of a proper noun but also an adjective that refers to the universality and so the fullness of the Church established by Christ. A search of the Latin Catholica Romana on the Vatican website will bring just two hits (though not all of the Latin texts are available on-line) and both are in the context of the Anglican-Catholic dialogue. A search of the English “Roman Catholic” turns up about 250 valid hits. The vast majority of these are also in the context of ecumenism and ecumenical dialogues. In fact, the only magisterial document that I could find that used the term “Roman Catholic” was Pius XII’s Humani Generis (the Latin was not available but the Italian and French translations use the same term). However, the USCCB seems to use the term quite regularly.
3. There are many Rites in the Catholic Church (i.e. those in union with Rome) and “Roman Catholic” seems to the many in the Eastern Rites to imply the Latin Rite. In fact, even in the Latin Rite, “Roman” ought better refer to the diocese of Rome.
4. The term “Catholic” better reflects union with the Pope and the Church in Rome, as it always has since the beginnings of the use of the term since at least Ignatius of Antioch in A.D. 110 (see here for more on this). This is so because Christ founded one unified, universal (catholic) Church whose unity was made visible with Peter, even before he went to Rome.

I have not used the term since. What do ya’ll think?