15 posts tagged “catholic vox”
I am heading out this weekend to visit my good friends the Mercedarians in Philadelphia. This religious order was founded in 1218 by one Peter Nolasco, since sainted, with its principle aim the ransom of Christian captives of the Saracens. A Spanish order, it was a product of a time when the struggle between the West and Islam was apparent and immediate. The Reconquista was proceeding apace, but unfortunately many Christians suffered as captive slaves of the Islamic Almohads.
As was common practice in those days, captives could be ransomed back for sums based on their station in life. A king's ransom would be something like the entire GDP of whichever kingdom he represented. Or not, I am no authority on international law of the 13th century. It was a sad reality that kings and lords were not the only people taken captive in this long and bitter conflict. Many captives were simply too poor to secure their release.
What distinguished this order (and in my opinion gives it particular valor) is its peculiar Fourth Vow. All religious orders take vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, with many opting for a Fourth Vow which is particular to their order and in line with their charism. But the Mercedarians made the Solemn Vow to exchange themselves for captives if ransom could not be met. They would replace these Christian captives, many of whom were in danger of losing their Faith by forced conversion, many of whom were in danger of execution. They vowed to give their life to ransom back people who were in danger of losing their faith.
Think on this. Today, Americans change religions like they change automobiles. The belief that our Faith and its profession has eternal consequences has fallen by the wayside. But in the founding days of the Order of Merced, the belief was strong that denying belief in God (or Allah, conversely) for an opposing religion would damn one to Hell. The belief is so weakened today by the noxious fumes of relativism that the noble origins of this order seem quaint by our enlightened standards.
Yet how heroic they really were. To lay down their lives in order to save the soul of another person required supreme faith and supreme courage. The order had men of such quality, and it continues today to boast men of like caliber. The specifics of ransoming those in danger of losing their faith are somewhat different, but the commitment to the salvation of souls remains strongly in place.
In this age of soft values and hard realities, we need men who will bolster our Faith and help us to call on God for strength. We need men who will meet the challenges of a both plunging cultural standards and militant Wahhabist Islam with Christian ideals. We need more men like the Mercedarians, to whom I now go.
I was reading an article about the pope's visit to America, and was pleased to see that it was positive. I'm excited about this opportunity for American Catholics to see and hear the pope address them directly. It doesn't happen every day, you know.
But this article, well, it was funny. Because it was humming along just fine until the very last paragraph. Here it is:
Notice anything funny there? Because to me, it looks like we're debating whether we should sing a song that mentions God when we're hosting the freaking Pope. Does it matter if it's a "public event?" We put God on our money, and we have prayer before the sessions of Congress. This doesn't rise beyond that level of public acknowledgment of God.Soprano Kathleen Battle has been enlisted to sing "The Lord's Prayer" - a decision the White House defended as appropriate despite the overt insertion of religion into a public event. "I think we've struck the right balance," Perino said. "Many people across America and across the world say that prayer in order to provide themselves comfort and confidence in getting their day started."
I believe the courts have determined that the use of "God" on our money is defensible from a standpoint that it is not an endorsement by the state of a particular religion, but is merely in this day and age a reflection of our shared traditions and history. If our mottos were coined today I'm sure they would sound something like the Obama campaign rhetoric, but fortunately they were laid down in a time when men were able to speak openly in a public forum of their faith and its influence on their decisions.
May my grandchildren see the end of political correctness, I pray.
Keep watching this Pope, my friends. That includes you who aren't religious, and you who are primarily concerned with other things. He may surprise you. Suffice it to say that he can explain better than most of us why we believe what we believe about life, death, and what comes after.
Viva il Papa!
Not my words.
Relativism is powerful in Western life, evidenced in many areas -- from the decline in the study of history and English literature, through to the triumph of subjective values and conscience over moral truth and the downgrading of heterosexual marriage.
One reason for optimism is that no one believes, deep down, in relativism. People may express their scepticism about truth and morality in lecture rooms or in print, but afterwards they will go on to sip a cappuccino, pay the mortgage, drive home on the left side of the road, and presumably avoid acts of murder and cannibalism throughout their evening. People, unless insane, do not live as relativists. They care about truth and follow clear cut rules.
Nothing matters more than truth to our country. Differences about important issues such as war, slavery, abortion, euthanasia are different claims to moral truth, not merely competing preferences. Some who have never been deprived of truth can give it up too easily, perhaps using talk of relativism or secularism to camouflage their actual commitment to money, success, possessions, power. But these are ambiguous goods: they can be misused and are rarely distributed fairly.
It is getting to the truth about things and having the integrity to live by that truth that is the ideal we should pass to the next generation. By comparison, relativism is bankrupt: it offers no future because it is not liveable; and where it is a camouflage, what it camouflages is generally rotten and often shaped by greed.
--Cardinal George Pell
I've been struck in recent years at how poor the quality of debate has become in my country and around the world. I feel that this contemptible philosophy of relativism is mostly to blame. To lay claim to any sort of moral truth is seen as backwards, an anachronism. The current vogue is to merely "present one's opinion" and if someone should take issue with that then run to the safety of the lamest of rebuttals. How can any serious thinker allow for the existence of relativism in matters of morality or even politics? How can anyone who claims to be open-minded steadfastly refuse to change their mind on the subject of Absolute Truth?
Abortion is one of those things that I feel is a defining struggle for our time. Strong feelings exist on both sides of the debate, but for me it all comes down to the simple principle that no person should be denied the right to draw their first breath.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness...is their order an accident? I think not. Happiness can only be pursued in an atmosphere of liberty (from government, from tyranny, from discrimination). Liberty cannot be said to exist unless all are given equal rights under the law, and the foremost of these is the right to life.
Piddling questions of when life begins are irrelevant. Should we not err on the side of caution when dealing with such great matters as the life of a potential being? A being that if left to develop will only die from disease, defect or man's intervention. When weighed against the limitless potential of a human life these three instances are trifling obstacles. Always err on the side of life.
I often highlight the faults and crimes of radical Islam on this blog. In an attempt to be fair, here's something from my own people. This happens every year. Every year. The fight in Jerusalem is also a yearly occurrence. Don't mess with the Orthodox, because apparently they carry iron rods around with them to church. Even Franciscans got into the mix a few years ago.
Very much highlights the necessity of everyone coming back to the fold of the Catholic Church, in my humble opinion. But that's a religious matter. In political terms, this kind of stuff highlights the very strong convictions that can lead to violence, even among a religion that explicitly asks its adherents to turn the other cheek.
Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus
View larger imageSeven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
Howdy folks. Just found a new group on Vox which some of my many many readers (...) may want to join. It's Pro-Life Vox, and it's for people who don't agree with legalized abortion and who are willing to acknowledge the damage it does to people.
So, join up if you're in agreement. If you aren't, I wouldn't think it productive to post there.
TESTING THE FAITH
Bishop urges Christians to call God 'Allah'
Catholic leader believes it would help ease tensions between religions
Posted: August 15, 2007
3:28 p.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.comCatholic churches in the Netherlands should use the name Allah for God to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians, says a Dutch bishop.
Bishop Tiny Muskens (Courtesy Radio Netherlands Worldwide)Tiny Muskens, the bishop of Breda, told the Dutch TV program "Network" Monday night he believes God doesn't mind what he is called, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported.
The Almighty is above such "discussion and bickering," he insisted.
Muskens points to Indonesia, where he served 30 years ago, as an example for Dutch churches. Christians in the Middle East also use the term Allah for God.
"Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years," Muskens said. "In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can't we start doing that together?"
Muskens thinks it could take another 100 years, but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches, promoting rapprochement between the two religions, he said, according to Radio Netherlands.
However, a survey published today in the Netherlands' largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, showed 92 percent of the more than 4,000 people polled oppose the bishop's view, the Associated Press reported.
(Story continues below)
Some letters to the paper were filled with ridicule for the bishop.
"Sure. Lets call God Allah. Lets then call a church a mosque and pray five times a day. Ramadan sounds like fun," wrote Welmoet Koppenhol.
The chairman of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, Gerrit de Fijter, told the Dutch paper he welcomed any attempt to "create more dialogue," according to the AP. But he said, "Calling God 'Allah' does no justice to Western identity. I see no benefit in it."
A Muslim spokesman, for Amsterdam's union of Moroccan mosques, said Muslims had not asked for such a gesture from Christians, the AP reported.
Tensions with the Netherlands' 1-million-strong Muslim community have been high since the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim avenging a film critical of Islam.
Last week, politician Geert Wilders talked about banning the Quran, shortly after the head of a group of former Muslims, Ehsan Jami, compared Islam's prophet Muhammad with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Muskens made similar remarks several year ago about using the name of Allah, Radio Netherlands reported. He also suggested replacing the national Christian holiday Whit Monday – celebrated the day after Pentecost – with an Islamic religious day.
The bishop also has offended Muslims, saying in 2005 Islam was a religion without a future because it has too many violent aspects
Ok, so when I said I'd ridicule another faith, I didn't really think it would be my own. And of course, it's not actually my faith that's on the block here. But this representative of my faith deserves some ire.
Firstly, the point I want to make is the one made by the Protestant. Simply calling God "Allah" does nothing to encourage mutual respect and deference...the actual goal and the point in which Islam is lacking. To simply give up our Western identity because we know a bunch of Mecca-lovers are going to throw a tantrum is spineless.
Which brings me to the point in which Christianity is lacking: too much deference to a faith which doesn't deserve it. In fact, I'd like to see more criticism like that levied by my pope, though after the riots that more than likely won't happen. Because think about it...Catholicism is attacked almost daily, its precepts misrepresented in the media and its priests slandered because of the actions of a few. I've always been a believer that turning the cheek needs to give way to institutional survival, and Catholicism needs to grow a pair.
Forgive my earthiness, but it galls me that we can sit in little circles and talk about how we've got things right and we need to enlighten our Protestant bretheren and those of other faiths, and yet when Islam starts whining we have a bishop who advocates adoption of the Muslim name for God. In a misguided attempt to appease our enemies (let's face it, we're in competition here) that would weaken our distinctive Western characteristics. His point that the Church in Asia uses the name "Allah" is not relevant to the Church in the West.
I think that the time for nancy-boy Christianity has passed. It never actually had a time given to it, rather I feel my faith has been usurped by short-sighted institutional martyrs who want to embrace the oblivion that is relativism. On my blog I'm often accused of bigotry...how can believing that I am right (and by extension, that others are wrong) about God make me a bigot? I don't deny anyone the opportunity to come around to my faith. I have staked my claim to truth, and I refuse to compromise on it. Unlike this bishop.
One more thing: like most of the problems with cultural apathy, this is what seems a subtle and insignificant change. What does it matter if we call God "Allah" anyway? But it'll make it that much easier for the Muslims to make inroads in Europe. And I don't want that, frankly.
To anyone who might be in the Catholic Vox group, nota bene -- Please review new group guidelines for posts. I've noticed a lot of very general posts in there that have nothing to do with Catholicism. Please limit your posts to Catholic specific articles, questions, commentary, or even prayers if you are inclined. Ecumenical prayer, even! Interfaith prayer, maybe!
But in order to keep the group from becoming unwieldy I shall forthwith issue this fiat: Thou shalt not post to Catholic Vox that which is not geared towards Catholic topicry.
Suggestion: Somebody blog about how the L.A. Diocese just paid $660 million to abuse victims. That would be Catholic specific.
Suggestion: Nobody post a blog which doesn't even mention Catholicism.
I say to thee "word."
Hardly anybody ever makes the point that the L.A. diocese, with its
rampant "progressive" Catholicism, also has had to dole out the most in
sex-abuse money. It's gotten so bad that the Prince has had to sell his fancy new office buildings. I found a site that will soothe my worries about the Los Angeles diocese under His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony.
This is Sherwin Nuland from New Republic via Amy Welborn:
There have been many times that I've been in the company of those who are unaware of my Catholicism, who have put forth similar misconceptions about the Church with sure certainty. And it is true that there are stories about the Church that every young Protestant is told...some taken for granted to be accurate. Part of that is an American problem, since America has never been particularly receptive to Catholicism....I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out as emphatically as if he were addressing a jury, had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement, he added in his summation, but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.
Were Benedict XVI present to act as advocate for his long-ago predecessors, he would have entered a plea of not guilty on their behalf. And the pope would certainly have won the ensuing debate, because the overwhelming weight of evidence supports his long-dead clients. Stated simply, the persuasive lawyer was dead wrong. Whatever difficulties may have been faced by Galileo and several other prominent scientists of that and later eras, the anatomists and the artists had few such obstructionist forces to contend with, at least from the Catholic hierarchy of the time. The truth of the matter differs markedly from what might have been thought by the old alums listening with such knowing accord to the disquisition being presented to them.
Not only did the church not stand in the way of dissection, but it frequently provided an atmosphere and means to facilitate it. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such a supportive philosophy is to be found in a Bull issued in 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV, who responded to a request from the students and faculty of the University of Tübingen by permitting human dissection providing that local clerical permission was granted. In doing this, Sixtus was only acknowledging practices already in effect at the universities of Bologna and Padua, in both of which he had been a student and in neither of which had church authorities ever prevented the opening of corpses for the purposes of research and teaching.
Leonardo's first such studies took place in the mid-1480s, probably at Milan's Ospedale del Brolo, a unit of the Ospedale Maggiore licensed to allow dissections with the consent of the local bishop. And scarcely a decade after the Bull of Sixtus, the prior of the Church of San Spirito in Florence gave dissecting permission to, among others, a young painter named Michelangelo Buonarroti. As for grave-robbing, it is no historical aberration that the best-known escapades of famous grave robbers and their ghastly doings happen to have taken place in Protestant countries, such as England, Scotland, and the United States. The explanation for this phenomenon is clear: it was primarily in Protestant lands, not Catholic ones, that bodies were difficult to obtain, because there were stringent, often clergy-driven, laws against dissection.
I do not mean to imply that my tablemate was an ignoramus, or that his hearers were swayed by his argument because they were uneducated in the facts as presented in standard descriptions of early modern history. It is hardly their fault that current-day literature and even many textbooks have portrayed an imaginary scenario in which the church stood inexorably opposed to the Renaissance mood of rapidly emerging scientific discovery, particularly with respect to delving into the secrets of life. Every schoolboy knows that the new humanism that is the hallmark of the period manifested itself, among other ways, in a fascination with the structure and function of man's body, but every schoolboy has also been taught that the Catholic Church did what it could to halt or at least slow the scientific progress that might be the inevitable result of such a fascination. If he did not learn it in the classroom, the schoolboy read of it as portrayed in every example of the literary fiction that deals with the subject.
Katharine Park's important book has two major themes, and putting to a well-deserved rest the erroneous image of a thoroughly resistant church is one of them. True, there were certainly conspicuous instances--and again, Galileo's is the most prominent--of theological wrongheadedness and maleficent obstructionism, and even an underlying current of belief that made certain scientists of the early modern period interpret objective findings in a way that did not clash with church teachings. But in general Catholicism has taken a rap much more severe than it deserves, especially in the area of anatomy...
I have a friend whose father takes particular pleasure in making jabs at Catholicism in my presence. He seems alternately to imply that because of the sins of individual members of the Church the institution is rendered defunct, or by ascribing political motivations for Catholic practices (eating fish on Friday, for example) attempting to cast aspersions again upon the institution.
I find religious discussion with others must always move towards ending at a simple declaration of belief or the conversion of one party to the other's Faith. To end a discussion otherwise is like unto ending a sentence with a colon: In truth, I find colons rude little fellows and any concept which can be tenuously connected to them to be distasteful.
I think that my friends who are not Catholic would say that I do not
bash people over the head with my religion, nor do I lean on them to
convert, but I do draw lines and rise to challenges against my
faith. Sometimes this means I myself am "rude." Had I been
at the dinner equipped with this knowledge, why I would have
interrupted that lawyer's grand oration with nary a second thought and
ruined everyone's five minutes of entertainment.
