Richard Chonak: August 2003 Archives

Loving God leads us to love others for His sake: everyone who belongs to Him; which is to say, everyone. Here's St. Thomas on friendship:

When a man has friendship for a certain person, for his sake he loves all belonging to him, be they children, servants, or connected with him in any way. Indeed, so much do we love our friends, that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us; so that, in this way, the friendship of charity extends even to our enemies, whom we love out of charity in relation with God, to whom the friendship of charity is chiefly directed.

Fr. Victor Brezik, CSB, in an article on Friendship with God, takes it a little further:

By this principle of loving not only a friend but also whatever pertains to him, we understand why charity obliges us to be disposed in our hearts to love all human beings, if not even other animate and inanimate beings comprising the environment, not that the latter can be loved as friends, since they lack rationality, but that as creatures they belong to God Whom we love as a friend....

(Thanks to Fr. Brezik for permission to post his article.)

It's Sunday afternoon, and time for the post-game wrap-up on how Mass went.

Today I went to St. Devotio's again, which had had a good preacher last week. I noticed they had a piano: a bad sign, and unfortunately, a musician came out and used it.

He played competently, but the instrument of torture apparently was not an acoustic piano, but a digital one that let him add other sampled instrument voices or even shut off the piano voice: something like this.

So on one piece it was piano and synthesizer, and on another guitar and harp were added. So phony.

At least at the end he played "Let There Be Peace On Earth", so I took the opportunity to sing my own lyrics.

It must be bad-liturgy season at Victor's parish too.

Update: And Jeff Miller's.

Although my sentiments are very much with the devout citizens of Alabama who want to keep a public monument to the Decalogue in a courthouse, Michael Williams is correct: Justice Moore's legal case was weak, and the demonstrations advance nothing, except for his budding career as a demagogue.

Regina Carter is a wonderful jazz violinist; she played with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood Monday night, in a triple-bill program with (Bronx) Celtic fiddler Eileen Ivers and classical violinist Lara St. John.

Last Sunday, I walked out of Mass.

It was at St. Suburbia's in the next town, where Fr. Leo preached an inoffensive little talk with at least some connection to the Gospel reading. That was the end of the "Bread of Life discourse" in John 6. Fr. was saying that the Eucharist is part of God's ongoing message to humanity: "Do not fear: I am with you." And that was OK. If only he'd known when to shut up!

The ad-hoc lector had read the "short form" of the Epistle text from St Paul to "the Christian community at Ephesus". And so he had not read us the passage (is it chapter 5?) that feminists don't like: "Submit yourselves to one another, out of reverence for Christ": wives, "be subservient" to your husbands [ooh, that's bad], and husbands, love your bride and lay down your life for her.

Since that part of the text had not been read to us, there wasn't any urgent need for Fr. Leo to speak about it, but he couldn't leave well enough alone: yes, he went back and read it. He opined that "women have a problem" with it, and declared that that passage was the best proof there is that St. Paul hadn't written Ephesians.

Fr. Leo just didn't seem to have gotten the point of the Gospel pericope that he had also read to us.

Now, I'm not shocked to hear that some Scripture scholars say that Ephesians differs in vocabulary and structure from other letters of St. Paul, and they think that it may have been put together by a follower of St. Paul as a summary of his teaching. As a theory, I've no problem with that: but the homily is not intended as an opportunity for a priest to attack the teachings of Scripture that we find hard.

That very Gospel passage from St. John had focused on the problem of a "hard teaching": on the break between (on one hand) Jesus, who taught that he was going to give us His flesh and blood to eat and drink, and (OTOH) those disciples who decided they didn't believe any more, and left him.

A "hard teaching", when it comes, is a challenge to me, and it's a mistake to write it off as inauthentic -- when more often it is I who am inauthentic!

The Spirit sent me out into the wilderness, so to speak, and so I left.

There was still plenty of time to get to St. Devotio's, and it was worth it: Fr. Daniel Dharmu, SMA, a young Indian-born missionary, just five years a priest, was visiting, and spoke about his work in East Africa. He's doing evangelization on the front line, bringing the Gospel to people who haven't heard it before, and performing about 250 adult baptisms a year. His 40-mile-by-20-mile mission zone has so many mission stations that he can only say Mass at each one monthly. Now, that is doing the work of God. That is a faith response to the Gospel.

Update: That other priest must be getting around!

Is this a sign that the culture wars are getting people all worked up? One of my friends on the net sent me one of those e-mail petitions trying to save religious TV from being suppressed by Madalyn O'Hair and petition 2493.

Normally, I'd expect an experienced Internet user like Bob to spot that phony-baloney story a mile away. Maybe the current spate of stories about anti-religious and anti-moral moves in society has got him on edge and made him more willing to fall for such an appeal.

But there is no truth to it: poor old O'Hair is dead, and she never tried to get the FCC to ban religious TV. The real petition 2493 didn't involve her and was not an attempt to do that anyway. It sought to bar religious organizations from getting "educational" broadcast licenses. That petition was turned down: in 1975!

Let's stamp out these scare-mongering stories, folks.

I'm a bit of a traditionalist about funerals. Burying people in a fixed place rather than taking their cremated remains home helps avoid this sort of thing.

"For every 10 births in Russia, there are still nearly 13 abortions." --Steven Myers, NY Times

Yet Russia's new law is a step in the right direction: it restricts the permitted grounds for mid- and late-term abortions to:

...rape, imprisonment, the death or severe disability of the husband or a court ruling stripping a woman of her parental rights. Being a single mother or a refugee [or divorced or in poor housing...--RC] is no longer reason enough to abort a pregnancy after the 12th week.

As before, pregnancies can still be aborted after 12 weeks on medical grounds, including severe disabilities of the fetus or a threat to the mother's life.

It won't have a big effect on the raw numbers, and it leaves several obviously immoral reasons undisturbed, as well as all abortions up to the 12th week -- but removing some of the "reasons" is a good step that will save a few lives.

Law school dean Nabil Helmy of Egypt's Zagazig University thinks he's got "the Jews of the world" right where he wants them: according to the newspaper Al-Ahram Al-Arabi (cited by MEMRI), he's suing them -- all of them -- in Switzerland, to get back the goods that the Israelites took with them in the Exodus.

Obviously this is a publicity stunt. Professor Helmy must think he's pretty clever to base his claim on the Hebrew Scripture -- they can't wiggle out of that one, huh?

Fortunately, Prof. Helmy's unusual legal theory would seem to open the plaintiff up to a countersuit: how many hundreds of years of Hebrew slavery would Egypt have to pay for?

I sent Steve Schultz a note today:

While you're at it, what's your paper-mail address going to be at the seminary?

("Snail mail" isn't a very nice term: I like to think of it as "Mail Classic".)
--RC

Zenit reports on Mirabilandia, the theme park in Ravenna with a spiritual side: it even has a church on the grounds! Here's the park's official site, and an unofficial one, with some English pages. Hold tight on the roller coaster!

Deal Hudson is setting it up for our Lady's day (September 8).

John Allen updates us on some recent news stories: CBS's would-be "smoking gun" document; the inter-communion abuse in Germany; the cloning debate.

Found a cool net-toy: according to Google, these sites are similar to ours. The graphic is from TouchGraph. It's fun to just watch the thing draw.

Hey, John, here's a new taste treat for you guys on the Atkins diet!

Here at MeatShake Corporation, we have a simple vision:

Meat. Lots of meat.

We bring you our vision in the most amazing and scrumptious forms imaginable. Our dedication to meat is nothing short of mighty.

That's our promise to you, the valued customer.

Mm: the (Christmastime) Vanilla Ham Shake sounds gooood!

Victor Lams gives the Congregationalist Pied Piper a good fisking.

A reader takes me to task
for taking some ex-Jesuit to task,
after he took a Cardinal to task,
because he took contemporary moral errors to task: clear?

No, it wasn't to me, either. I had to look up the original post to know what he was talking about. It's linked below.

The anonymous reader opines:

i find it breathtaking that communicants of the roman church continue to defend an institution that has lost virtually all its moral authority. your attack of ed ingebretsen was particularly offensive. i suppose all of this must be put in a realistic context: the roman church has always had problems with intellectual honesty. ed was... yikes.. honest. at least with the rise of secularism, your church was not able to stick him on a stake and burn him. that said, your organization continues to exclude so many, so unbelievably many from society. the irony though is that your church is so dominated by hopelessly neurotic, self loathing gay people. but i trust in god. eventually your church will find itself again on the wrong side of this issue, just as it did when confronted with scientific, intellectual and moral truth. now that the emperor is running around naked, the church is being watched very closely. and the picture is not pretty is it? your people represent the derriere guard of christianity.. could you please pick up the pace??

Well, at least the guy is consistent: first this Professor Ingebretsen gets three of his fifteen minutes of fame by insulting the honesty of a cardinal ("These things are exactly what he's paid to say"), and now the writer of the above fan mail impugns the "intellectual honesty" of the Catholic Church. Neither of them seems to realize what a weak argument that is: instead of openly disputing Catholic doctrine as erroneous, they evade the subject by suggesting that we don't really, truly believe it: if we would just be honest with ourselves, we'd agree with them.

Shall I tease the guy for not knowing his French? The term is garde arri�re, not "derriere"; and, given the context, the temptation to make a wisecrack about that is great.

But no, I will forbear: this irate reader has a soul too, and although I think he's inappropriately angry, I don't really want to hurt his feelings. We're all sinners here, and he needs instruction as all of us do sometimes.

The Church's teaching on sexual ethics w.r.t. homosexuality is just not understandable without The Big Picture, the noble and beautiful Catholic vision of sexuality and marriage. Maybe that's one more reason for me to point people to Bishop Galeone's pastoral letter. Until people understand the central meaning about the body, spousal love, and marriage, they'll regard the rest of Catholic sexual ethics as arbitrary.

Update: Back in July, CWN posted the text of Cdl. Arinze's praiseworthy speech at Georgetown that drew all this attention, with analysis by historian James Hitchcock.

Search on Google for "Catholic", and you'll probably get this ad:

Are Catholics doomed.
Did you know that most people in
the Mafia are Catholic? Worried.
www.Dont_Worship_in_Vain.com

Click through if you want to see the site: it only costs them -- oh, I'd guess about $0.15 each time.

By the way, folks, we don't often talk about this, but our traffic is up! A year ago we averaged around 150 visits/day, and this month it's over 450/day.

We know we'll never be competition for the Drudge Report or even Instapundit, but it's a pleasure to know that somebody out there is dropping by. Aw, shucks.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, who died on August 4 aged 89, was the senior Russian Orthodox archbishop in Western Europe, and the best known Orthodox cleric in Britain.

The archbishop was well known for his books on spirituality, including Beginning to Pray.

Although a loner and difficult to work with at times, Anthony was never aloof. Like all Orthodox bishops he was easily accessible to his flock, and this could have comical results. When one parishioner rang to say that "Peter" had died and asked for prayers, the Archbishop immediately complied, later asking when the funeral would be. "Oh, there won't be one," he was told. "We flushed Peter down the loo." Peter turned out to be a budgerigar.

Would you pray for two families who got sad news about their kids this week?

L., at eight months of pregnancy, found out on Friday that her baby is stillborn: "I had a heartbeat (normal) on Monday, and on Friday I noticed that I hadn't experienced any fetal movement. Today I went in and found out the bad news." She has the delivery ahead of her.

B. writes that "God in His Providence has put a heavy cross on our shoulders to carry: His and our beloved 8 year old son P. has been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. All this is happening during our job transfer, thousand of miles away from family and friends. We're begging for prayers for his cure and also for grace for all of us to cooperate with God's holy Will in these dark hours of our lives."

Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins, and for those of the whole world.
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world....

We're all in this together.

Bishop Victor Galeone, the new ordinary of St. Augustine in Florida, has written an admirable summary of Catholic doctrine on marriage and sexual ethics in his pastoral letter, "Marriage: A Communion of Life and Love".

The bishop knows that the Gospel of Life runs counter to secular thinking, and he makes a point of saying so:

The vast majority of people today consider contraception a non-issue. So much so that to label it a disorder sounds like a gross exaggeration. And to revisit it seems analogous to studying a treatise from the Flat Earth Society. But contraception is an issue, an absolutely vital issue. To comprehend why it is wrong, it’s first necessary to understand what God originally intended marriage to be. In the opening chapters of Genesis we learn that God himself designed marriage for a twofold purpose: to communicate life and love.

(Thanks to Jeff and Alicia for the link.)

It's conventional to give Protestantism the credit for fostering virtues and attitudes conducive to economic advancement, but Michael Novak points out the Catholic roots of capitalism, in the inventiveness of monastic communities and the stability fostered by the Church's legal system.

In spite of his personal fondness for Stalin and Stalinism, Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti apparently wasn't quite the perfect dialectical materialist: he had a superstitious side and patronized several consulting magicians. That will provide some interesting stories when it all comes out.

Leviticus 14: 34 When you have entered Canaan, which I am giving you to occupy, if I inflict a fungous infection upon a house in the land you have occupied, 35 the owner must come and report to the priest that there appears to him to be a patch of infection in his house. 36 The priest must order the house to be emptied before he goes in to examine the infection or everything in it will become unclean. After this the priest must go in to inspect the house.

37 If on inspection he finds the patch on the walls consists of greenish or reddish depressions, apparently going deeper than the surface, 38 he is to go out of the house, and at the entrance put it in quarantine for seven days. 39 On the seventh day he must return and inspect the house, and if the patch has spread in the walls, 40 he must order the infected stones to be pulled out and thrown away outside the town in an unclean place. 41 He must also then have the house scraped inside throughout, and all the daub they have scraped off is to be tipped outside the town in an unclean place. (REB)

More amusing Scripture verses and cartoons at Breadwig.

A mathematician and a psychologist have devised a 94% reliable method for predicting whether couples will divorce.

[...] the couple's ability to communicate was marked using a scale that gave positive points for good signals and negative points for bad signals.

For example, jokes, a positive tone of voice, smiles and affectionate gestures all resulted in positive scores. Bad signals such as rolling of the eyes, criticism, mocking and coldness led to a negative score.

Rolling of the eyes, criticism, mocking, and coldness? Uh-oh: going by what's in this blog, I don't think I have any other modes of communication!

Check out da tings da Bible say!

(Thanks, eje.)

Records from the Archdiocese of Boston appear to show that even after diocesan officials started tracking the sexual-abuse problem closely in 1993, they didn't face it:

"That is a fair thing to say: It wasn't until 2002 that we came to look at the depth of the problem that we had and we really began to address it," [spokesman Rev. Christopher] Coyne said.

Even as late as 1998 or '99, there was a time to bite the bullet and expose the problem, because the jubilee year called upon us in the Church to admit faults and seek pardon before God and man. There were some such confessions and apologies, mostly for faults committed hundreds of years ago: a good thing as far as it went; but there was a spiritual opportunity to go further, to acknowledge sins and failures that affected people living now, and the Cardinal let it go by. One can only wonder how different things would be now.

As Mark Shea has noticed, the Venice (FL) diocese has a puzzling poll question on its website this week. They're asking whether bishops should be appointed by the Pope or elected by the people of the diocese.

I think the answer is obvious. In an era when 70% of U.S. Catholics don't understand the doctrine of the Real Presence, we should regard the Catholic population here as in need of mission: in need of re-evangelization, conversion, and catechesis. It makes no sense for the recipients of mission to elect the missionary.

It's not the first time, either, that the Venice web site people have stuck their neck out with a strange question. It's conceivable that they may be doing so with the aim of encouraging an interest in apologetics, but the results of these unscientific polls are not much to be sanguine about.

On the other hand, there are some really good things going on in the Venice diocese: the opening of Ave Maria University this fall, the Monks of Adoration who moved there from Massachusetts, and the scholarly and prudent fez-wearing canonists who serve in the diocesan tribunal.

Yes, Victor's blog has proof that he and Fr. Sibley are for real. Or at least are real.

Over lunch today Professor Russell Hittinger gave a lecture at the conference about Pope Leo XIII (Gioacchino Pecci). He mentioned that before Leo XIII's papacy, his predecessor had issued the famous "Syllabus of Errors", a wide-ranging list of doctrinal errors Catholics were to shun, and Bp. Pecci had contributed to the document's draft. For better or worse, the Pope didn't adopt his suggestion for the document's title: "Mary, Exterminator of Heresies".

On hearing that, the folks at our table, including Fr. Sibley, exchanged the thumbs-up sign: we think it was a great title: it would sound good, say, in the name of a religious order, or even just a local church ("I go to Mass at Mary Exterminator of Heresies Parish")!

(Posting from Ypsilanti this weekend at Ave Maria's Thomistic Theology conference.)

Here's one for the "Credit where it's due" department:

I used to think that "Soeur Sourire" was just the lamest thing possible: a nun with a guitar back in 1964 singing some silly song she wrote. It made the top pop-charts -- one of the rare times a foreign-language song did so well. But I have been writing her off as a symbol of the whole disaster of trendy nuns falling for pop culture and losing the faith.

On the other hand, have you ever seen the lyrics -- the original ones in French? They're quite faith-filled: they're all about St. Dominic preaching to (and against) the Albigensian heretics: and the song even calls them that. It sounds all happy-clappy, but the text is quite triumphal.

(Ignore the English version on the page linked above: it's not the real thing.)

Alas, poor Soeur Sourire and her vocation did end up on the rocks: she did leave religious life, like so many others, and came to a bad end in 1985, another washed-up one-hit wonder. If only she'd stuck with St. Dominic!

If this report on the local news in Detroit is right, one priest is begging for a smackdown.

Fifteen families who complained that their pastor let his defrocked brother say Mass at his parish got letters telling them the were no longer welcome at the church.

Something tells me that correct canonical procedure was not quite followed, and parishioner Adam Nguyn seems to know that:"Whatever happened, I'm not going to leave until the pope come and say to me, Adam, you cannot participate in the church."

You tell 'em, Mr. Nguyn!

NR's John Derbyshire, an eminently reasonable and tolerant Episcopalian, is having second thoughts about tolerance itself. With this week's approval of Canon Robinson, he has realized that the homosexualist lobby is not as willing as he is to leave others a broad sphere of private opinion, but demands approval and aims to silence opposition. In such a situation, truly libertarian tolerance is not possible: one side or the other -- the normal or the abnormal -- will dominate.

Perhaps our grandfathers were wiser than us. Perhaps there are some things that we, the normal majority, SHOULD, deliberately and consciously, disapprove and marginalize.

My favorite lesbian, the iconoclastic Camille Paglia, was interviewed for three hours on C-SPAN last Sunday, and offered a relevant insight. Although she's in a ten-year-long relationship, and her partner recently gave birth, she is not a supporter of "same-sex marriage". Paglia understands that marriage is essentially a religious rite, and as she is an atheist, it does not correspond to her beliefs. She observes that societies that give official sanction to homosexuality through "marriage" are generally decadent, and this worries her, because she wants Western civilization to survive. She argues that the principal civil effects gay people want (the ability to inherit, to be involved in medical decisions, etc.) can be achieved through wills, power-of-attorney agreements, etc., so the clamoring for marriage is unnecessary -- and even sometimes hysterical.

Back to Derbyshire: he worries that the same trends wrecking the Episcopal Church are underway in the Catholic Church. He's right: but Catholics have a reason for hope. Unlike Episcopalians who believe as a matter of course that Church councils can err and have erred -- that the official teaching Church is fallible -- Catholics believe that the official teaching Church is protected by a gift of the Holy Spirit who keeps her from accepting and embracing error in her doctrines. If this doctrine is true, the Catholic Church will always survive, preaching the Gospel, and the gates of Hell shall not stand against her.

Miss Welborn has announced that she'll be moving soon to a new blog service.

Update your links, folks.

Judging by the search-engine hits that lead people to our site, some of our readers are probably wondering why we haven't commented on the current fuss in the Episcopal Church. Poor things: they only seem to attract public attention when they're in the process of jettisoning another element of the Christian faith.

This time, as you know, the fracas is over whether they'll approve as a bishop a (1) openly gay (2) divorced minister, who is (3) in an active non-marital sexual relationship. Once upon a time, those would have been three disqualifications for the Biblical office of bishop, but that is no longer the case.

The story took a soap-opera turn today, when a male accuser from the past popped up to call the Reverend Canon, in an interesting choice of words, a "skirt-chaser".

What will happen? Will conservatives sway some last-minute votes and keep the status quo in place? Will Robinson slip through anyway? Will Canterbury try to hold things together with a "two province" solution that lets the Episcopal Church split, but keeps both parts in the Anglican Communion? Will Third-World Evangelicals go along?

The outcome doesn't affect the Catholic Church much at all: the ECUSA has not been a reliable partner in ecumenical relations for some time, and whether they stay together or break up, the resulting bodies don't seem likely to be much more internally coherent than the current EC. But I could be proved wrong.

This Nawlins crack-up could have come right from his pages.

Boy, this is an odd case. How did I miss it when it happened last year?

Observers of the ecumenical scene will recall that there are currently three substantial Orthodox bodies competing for legitimacy in Ukraine.

Last year, one bishop of the Kyivan patrarchate apparently decided to advance ecumenical relationships in his own way: by getting involved in another church's fringe groups. He paid a visit to a schismatic traditionalist Catholic sect in the US, went through some sort of ceremony, and signed some sort of document; and they announced that he had "abjured his errors" and entered into full communion with them -- in effect, become a sedevacantist Catholic. I don't know about you, but to me that doesn't necessarily look like a move upward.

A few weeks later, Bishop Yurii was back at home denying that he had had any intention of doing what he appeared to have done, and agreeing to the appointment of another bishop to watch over his eparchy.

The links above show all the information I have about this case, so it's hard to tell what was really going on, but I'm guessing that there was some medical explanation for all this.

Can you believe this one: here's how the CBC's international service spins a bishop's criticism of the Government's "gay marriage" proposal:

CALGARY: COUNCIL OF BISHOPS WON'T CENSOR HENRY
There will not be any reprimands for an outspoken Canadian Catholic bishop who suggested last week that Prime Minister Jean Chretien's soul was in jeopardy over the legalization of same-sex marriage. Peter Schonenbach of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops says the bishops don't have the authority to reprimand Calgary Bishop Fred Henry. Bishop Schonenbach says Bishop Henry is entitled to his opinion. Bishop Henry appears unrepentant. He says Catholic people have been asking when someone is going to remind Catholic politicians of their responsibilities. A spokesman for Mr. Chretien says his primary responsibility is to the Canadian people, not to his religion.

The mere suggestion that Bishop Henry be reprimanded is galling.

But there is good news: Toronto's archbishop has directed priests to preach the Church's teaching on the subject.

The US diocesan appointments came out on Friday this week.

The Pope has appointed Bp. Nicholas DiMarzio of Camden, NJ to succeed 75-year-old Bp. Thomas Daily in the country's largest non-archdiocese diocese. For readers wanting to get to know Bp. DiMarzio better, here's a collection of his columns for the Camden diocesan paper.

Elsewhere, Bp. Sam Jacobs is being transferred from Alexandria (LA) to Houma-Thibodaux, succeeding Bp. Michael Jarrell (now in Lafayette). Also, Msgr. Peter Jugis is being appointed to Charlotte (NC). May God prosper their work!