The Fringe: August 2003 Archives

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?

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.

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.