Blasting off early tomorrow for the Catholic Scripture Study Conference in Charlotte, NC

I'll be back Monday. Please don't send me news links cuz they'll be old and gray by the time I blog again.

Toodles!

Da Vinci Plagiarism Judge codes Message Into His Decision

I'm likin' this guy.

A reader writes:

Supporters of killing Terri Schiavo generally claimed that she was in a persistant vegetative state and that she had said some years ago that she would not want to live in that condition. (The accuracy of that claim is not relevant to this posting.) Today a hospital in Houston wants to kill Andrea Clark who has said she wants to live. I saw mentions of her case on blogs that included calls for specific actions to try to save her life.

Here are three recent postings, first from April 24:

Then from April 25.

And from today

Since St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital is doing this to save money, maybe they should change their name to the Moloch and Mammon Hospital.

Culture of Death: We just want to honor the patient's wishes. Terri Schiavo wanted to die and those Christian Barbarians tried to force her to go on living against her wishes!

Andrea Clarke: Er, I'd rather not die, please.

Culture of Death: Shut up, you! What? Are you going to go on sponging off hard-working people forever? Why don't you have the good grace to get off the stage and stop sucking up resources? Who cares what you think?

From our Shameless Self-Promotion Department

#1 Catholic Bestseller for May 2006: The Da Vinci Deception

A toast to my co-author Ted Sri and the gang at Ascension Press and CatholicExchange.com!

Oh, and you can get your signed copies right here.

I am a Holy Scholar of the Feline Theocracy. Fear Me.

"There is no way to reconcile Christ's intentions with the slogan that was fashionable a few years ago, "Christ yes, the Church no." The individualist Jesus is a fantasy."

That's why laity who sit gloating about "justice" because the bishop's end of the boat is sinking don't seem to grasp what is going on. There's a Pavlovian response to terms like "institutional Church" because people who hear such phrases think "hierarchy" rather than "the pew I sit in, the food bank that helped me when I was out of work, the drug program that helped my brother-in-law, the hospital that saved my wife's life." At the end of the day, people seem to have this notion that the Church is a sort of disembodied entity and the physical concrete expression of the Church in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy are unrelated to it.

They also seem to have no clue what a "mediating institution" is. It means "all those groups out there that do stuff because its the right and neighborly thing to do and not out of a profit motive". Society is lubricated by such institutions and with out them it will rapidly overheat and seize up. Most of our lives are held together by thousands of small acts of mundane goodness that we don't notice. But we will sure as hell notice it when the Church (that's us, not just the clergy) is no longer able to function in the million ways we take for granted. Some have a romantic view of how Franciscan it will all be when, if they're lucky, the local parish can round up a card table, a paper plate, and some dixie cups and grab a Mass at the local Y. But the reality is: the poor are blessed because they are vulnerable to the predations of the strong and the Lord is their Avenger. If you think the destruction of the Institutional Church will be romantic affair of "getting back to basics", then I suggest you embrace reality and recognize that those who seek to destroy the Institutional Church are not interested in a trimmer, more fit Church. They are interested in stamping the Church out root and branch.

Judging from my comments, not a few will, at this point, assert that only a person who cares nothing for the victims of abuse could say this. That is, of course, patently ridiculous. I believe it is possible to do justice to victims of abuse with fair compensation for their sufferings and punishment for those who have caused that suffering. I even believe it is possible to do justice to victims of abuse without creating millions of *more* victims of a litigious culture that destroys the parishes and dioceses of perfectly innocent people by awarding insanely huge judgments that have as their end, not the common good, but the lining of pockets and the destruction of the Catholic Church. But that will mean we laypeople have to begin to familiarize ourselves with the notion of the Common Good again. And that, in turn, will mean familiarizing ourselves with the notion that we are saved as. a. People and not as a bunch of individuals who are out to get ours or to have a Me and Jesus relationship in which the Church plays no essential part. If we don't understand that, we can't hope to have a clue about why it will matter if the Church--that completely optional appendage to Me and My Jesus--goes away.

Now, as I said yesterday, the Church--the People of God--will not go away. If it survived the catacombs and Stalin and Mao, it can survive Mass at the Y. But when the last physical structure and dime of the Church is auctioned off to feed lawyers (and that, by the way, is what the "institutional Church" means--it doesn't mean the clergy), the ones who suffer will primarily be those whom the Church served: the weakest. With luck, you aren't among them. But the upheaval in our culture when the single most important mediating institution's ability to serve is destroyed in a frenzy of mindless vengeance may reveal some surprises about who is and is not weak.

By the way, getting back to the quotes above, Benedict also had this stunningly countercultural interlude:

But the strongest passages of the catechesis were those in which the pope explained the relationship between the institution of the apostles – twelve in number, like the twelve Jewish tribes – and the people of Israel.

The pope recalled Jesus’ intention “of founding the holy people again.” And then:

“By their mere existence, the twelve – called from different backgrounds – have become a summons to all Israel to conversion and to allow themselves to be reunited in a new covenant, full and perfect accomplishment of the old.”

I can already feel Andrew Sullivan *and* the ADL gearing up for a good ol' bout of hysterics.

Nifty little Bible tool for the Web

A reader asks:

I corresponded with you over a year ago regarding my journey from the Evangelical/Baptist upbringing to Catholocism. My husband served with Keith Green ministries back in the 80's (ouch on the Catholic Chronicles Keith wrote) and we both served in YWAM and various local church ministries. Needless to say, after three years of study and searching, I am more than ready to enter the Catholic Church. My husband, however, is stuck on the perpetual virginity of Mary due to various references to his brothers and sisters in the Bible. Also, he can't discern the primacy of Rome, knowing that the Early Church was spread out and had its roots in Jerusalem. He is also stuck on the split between East and West. These seem to be the source of questioning for him: basic authority issues and Mary. He did listen to your CD's, including the one on Mary, but he is looking for more info on the subject, as to why his Bible says one thing and the Church teaches another. Basically, who changed it and WHEN??

There's a lot here and I can't cover it all. For Papal stuff, I recommend Steve Ray's work such as "Upon This Rock". He's a former Baptist and knows his stuff. Bottom line, the Church doesn't have its roots in Jerusalem. It also doesn't have them in Rome. It has them in Christ, who made Peter the Chief Shepherd, the Strengthener of the Brethren and the Rock upon which he founded the Church.

For the general question of the authority of Sacred Tradition (Both Written and Unwritten) vs. The Bible Alone, I recommend my own By What Authority?.

As to the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, here's another little excerpt from my yet to be published book:

Evangelical Difficulties

Of course, serious Christians recognize that sex belongs in the context of marriage. But that, for Evangelicals, is the problem. For Joseph and Mary were married. So what on earth would have kept them from marital relations? And given that Scripture says Joseph "knew her not until she had borne a son" (Matthew 2:25); repeatedly refers to Jesus' "brothers and sisters" in passages like Mark 6:3 and
Matthew 13:55-56; and records Paul speaking of James as "the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19), the natural conclusion for the Evangelical reader is that Mary's Perpetual Virginity is a case where the Church isn't just filling in some scriptural silence with a flight of fancy, but is deliberately and directly contradicting Scripture—probably due to some pathological fascination with celibacy.

The Difficulty with the Evangelical Reading of Scripture

But as we've already seen during our tenure as Evangelical representatives to the Council of Jerusalem in chapter five, it's not enough to show that some Church doctrine seems to be "directly contradicted" by Scripture. Apparent contradictions don't cut the mustard. And the supposed Scriptural evidence for "Mary's other children" is another such apparent contradiction. For there is, in fact, no such evidence. Every text adduced to "prove" Mary had other natural-born children encounters some fatal difficulty when we look closely.

So, for instance, the attempt to find absolute, ironclad proof of sexual relations between Joseph and Mary in Matthew's remark that Joseph "knew her not until she had borne a son" suffers from the fatal ambiguity of the word "until." The whole value of the passage as an argument against Mary's virginity depends on some supposed "rule" that "until" means "the same before, but different afterwards." But if we try to apply this "rule", we wind up with strange results. Thus, Deuteronomy 1:31 tells Israel, "the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place." Does the author really mean to say that God would henceforth not be carrying Israel? Likewise, Deuteronomy 9:7 says, "From the day you left Egypt until you arrived here, you have been rebellious against the Lord." Does the sacred author mean to imply Israel magically stopped being rebellious after that? Or again, John the Baptist "lived in the desert until he appeared publicly to Israel" (Luke 1:80). Does Luke therefore mean to imply that
once John appeared to Israel he never lived in the desert after that? No. Similarly, neither is Matthew saying anything beyond "Mary conceived Jesus in virginity". He is making no implications whatever about any sexual relations between Mary and Joseph.

In the same way, the texts concerning Jesus' brothers and sisters were consistently read by the early Church with the understanding that the Apostles had taught Jesus was the only son of the Blessed Virgin. And once we get past our modern prejudice that "they simply can't mean that," we find to our surprise that they easily can.

Take James. Paul describes him as the "brother of the Lord", but James himself does not. Why not? And even more oddly, Jude describes himself as "a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James" (Jude 1). If Jude is a sibling of Jesus, why does he talk in this weird way?

The answer comes from a close reading of the Gospels. Matthew and Mark name the following as "brothers" of Jesus: James, Joseph (or "Joses" depending on the manuscript), Simon and Judas (i.e., "Jude"). But Matthew 27:56 says that at the cross were Mary Magdalene and "Mary the mother of James and Joseph", whom he significantly calls "the other Mary" (i.e., the Mary who was not Mary the Mother of Jesus). John concurs with this, telling us that "standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (John 19:25). In short, James, Jude and their brothers are the children of "the other Mary", the wife of Clopas, not Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

Interestingly, this "other Mary" is described as the Blessed Virgin's "sister". Is it really possible that two siblings were both named Mary? Probably not. Rather it's far more likely they were "sisters" in the same sense Jesus and the other Mary's son, James, were "brothers". That is, they were cousins or some other extended relation. And, indeed, we find Jewish culture could play fast and loose with the terms "brother" and "sister". For instance, Lot, who was the nephew of Abraham (cf. Genesis 11:27-31) is called Abraham's "brother" in Genesis 13:8 and 14:14-16. In the same way, when the Old Testament gets translated into Greek, the Jewish translators do the same thing, rendering "nephew" as "brother" (adelphos).

So the biblical evidence for siblings of Jesus slips steadily away until all that is left is the school of criticism which argues that, since Jesus is called the "firstborn" (Luke 2:7), this implied other children for Mary. But in fact the term "firstborn" was used mainly to express the privileged position of the firstborn whether or not other children were born. That is why a Greek tomb at Tel el Yaoudieh bears this inscription for a mother who died in childbirth: "In the pain of delivering my firstborn child, destiny brought me to the end of life."

Beyond that, all the critic of Perpetual Virginity has left is just the gut sensation that "It's weird for a normal married couple to practice celibacy." And that might be an argument—if Joseph and Mary were a normal married couple and not the parents of the God of Israel.

Mary's Witness to Her Perpetual Virginity

It is no secret that ancient Judaism, like the Church, prized the goods of marriage and family. But Judaism had room for celibacy too, if practiced for religious reasons. The best known example is the rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to Him we also have the example of the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 16:1-2), St. Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 7) and St. Philip's "four unmarried daughters, who prophesied." (Acts 21:9). Beyond the record of Scripture, we also find Jewish groups like the Essenes and the Therapeutae, who likewise consecrated themselves to virginity. Consecrated virginity was not unheard of in ancient Judaism.

Indeed, there's even room in ancient Judaism for celibacy within marriage:

Living a celibate life within marriage was not unknown in Jewish tradition. It was told that Moses, who was married, remained continent the rest of his life after the command to abstain from sexual intercourse (Ex 19:15) given in preparation [for the Theophany on Mount Sinai. Likewise,] the seventy elders abstained thereafter from their wives after their call, and so did Eldad and Medad when the spirit of prophecy came upon them; indeed it was said that the prophets became celibate after the Word of the Lord communicated with them (Midrash Exodus Rabbah 19; 46.3; Sifre to Numbers 99 sect. 11; Sifre Zutta 81-82, 203-204; Aboth Rabbi Nathan 9, 39; Tanchuman 111, 46; Tanchumah Zaw 13; 3 Petirot Moshe 72; Shabbath 87a; Pesachim 87b, Babylonian Talmud).

The question, of course, is whether Mary was among those devout Jews who chose to live a life of virginity. And the biblical evidence says, "Yes."

Consider: You are at a bridal shower for a friend and somebody remarks to the bride, "You are going to have such adorable kids!" Everybody laughs, but the bride gapes in astonishment and says, "How shall this be?" At that point, you would begin to notice something unusual about your friend. Because, for a woman who is betrothed to be married, there are only a limited number of explanations for such a reaction. Either nobody has ever explained the birds and the bees to her, and she genuinely has no idea how babies are made and what she's about to sign on for with her husband-to-be—or she has every intention of remaining a virgin after marriage.

The astonishing thing about Mary is that she's astonished. For she too is a woman betrothed. She knows about the birds and the bees. Yet she reacts with amazement at the news that she, a woman betrothed, will bear a son. Notice that the angel does not say "You are pregnant." He says "You will bear a son" (Luke 1:31). This is a promise that has been made to other women in Jewish history such as Sarah, Hannah, and the Shunammite woman (cf. Genesis 18; 1 Samuel 1; and 2 Kings 4). All of them understand the promise to mean, "You and your husband will conceive a child." So why should the same promise astonish Mary, a young woman who also plans to marry—unless she had already decided to remain a virgin throughout her life?

Joseph's Witness to Mary's Perpetual Virginity

The average modern reader of Matthew assumes Joseph disbelieved Mary and wanted to divorce her as an adulteress. Pictures come to the mind very easily of a Mary "pregnant out to there" and fumbling to explain to a skeptical Joseph that, well, it's not the way it looks and there was this angel, you see...

But surprisingly, there's another view of Joseph, one which Scripture supports better than the "Suspicious Joseph" portrait commonly accepted by modernity. In fact, it's a way of viewing Joseph's actions that was shared by such Church Fathers as Jerome, the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity.

Put yourself in Joseph' s shoes. You are a first century Jew, not a 21st-century materialist. Not just God, but angels, the afterlife, miracles, visions, and the whole supernatural world is, for you, as normal and real as daylight and sun on the flowers. Mary is a deeply godly woman you have known extremely well for years whom you both love and trust. She tells you she received a Visitation from an angel, not months after she becomes pregnant, but hours—perhaps minutes—after the angel has departed. She is breathless and astonished. But she's not given to hysteria or tall tales and she's dead serious. She tells you the angel said she would bear a son by the Holy Spirit. She's not "pregnant out to there" when she says this. She just says it. Perhaps she's not even sure she's pregnant, since the angel has given no timetable on when this shall happen. There's no guilt or shame in her eyes. And given all you know of her, the idea of her a) sleeping around (with who? This is a small town!) and b) coming up with this sort of story to cover it up is about as likely as Mother Teresa visiting some secret lover and then trying to cover it up by claiming she was impregnated by aliens. It's simply beyond her character to create such a wild story. So, to your amazement and fear, you find Mary's story is less incredible to you than the proposition of Mary's unchastity.

Especially since that's not all Mary says. She also reports that the angel said her aged cousin Elizabeth is pregnant too. There's been no news from Zechariah and Elizabeth for several months. Then, a few days later, word comes from the Judean hill country: Elizabeth is pregnant despite her advanced age. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. And as weeks and months roll on, you find your beloved Mary is indeed pregnant too. She looks at you with absolutely honest eyes and says, "Remember what I told you about the angel and his message?"

I don't know about you, but if it were me and my wife, I would believe her—and feel deeply unworthy to even be in her presence. Incredible as it sounds, I would find it even more incredible to think that the Janet I've known all these years could be making all that up. I trust her that much. And I think Joseph trusted Mary that much.

Particularly since his behavior signals precisely this. He acts, not like an outraged and betrayed man, but like a man who, as the months progress, feels more and more the crushing weight of his appointed task and the dread of the Holy One in the words Mary relayed to him from the angel:

He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and
he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of his kingdom there will
be no end." (Luke 1:32-33)

Joseph does not act angry at Mary. And he knows perfectly well there's no danger of public disapproval because the assumption would have been that the child was his. Only Joseph and Mary know that the child is... Whose? That appears to be the question weighing on Joseph. So he contemplates finding some escape hatch, hoping to "send her away quietly" (Matthew 1:19) so that she won't incur the public shame of his "rejection" while he avoids the terrifying burden God is laying on his feeble shoulders.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Joseph then has a dream in which an angel speaks to him. And remember, Joseph believes in dreams, visions, and the like. The dream confirms everything Mary told him: "that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:20-21). But even more than that, the dream attests that Joseph was grappling not with disbelief, but belief—and a profound sense of unworthiness. For the angel in the dream does not say, "Don't suspect Mary of adultery." The angel says, "Do not fear to take Mary your wife" (Matthew 1:20). He addresses Joseph as "son of David," thereby reminding him that the Messiah is to come through David's line. The angel reminds Joseph that this task has been appointed for him by God, despite Joseph's sense of unworthiness.

Now, as we have already seen, it didn't take long for the Jewish mind to discern the connection between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant. For Luke and John it's an incredibly obvious connection because Mary and the Ark were both the dwelling place of the living God among his people. How easy would it have been for Joseph, knowing what he knew, to make the same connection—and to remember what happens to people who touch the Ark without the Lord's permission?

And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there because he put forth his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God. (2 Samuel 6:6-7).

So, even from a human perspective, it becomes very probable that Joseph would have chosen celibacy in this rather unusual situation. But beyond such negative factors influencing Joseph's thought, it also worth noting that he was a devout Jew who not only feared but loved God. Thus, Joseph might very well have recognized another parallel between his stewardship of Mary and Moses' stewardship of the "Holy of Holies" wherein the Lord dwelt:

Jewish tradition mentions that, although the people had to abstain from sexual relations with their wives for only three days prior to the revelation at Mount Sinai (Ex 19:15), Moses chose to remain continent the rest of his life with the full approval of God. The rabbis explained that this was so because Moses knew that he was appointed to personally commune with God, not only at Mount Sinai but in general throughout the forty years of sojourning in the wilderness. For this reason Moses kept himself "apart from woman," remaining in the sanctity of separation to be at the beck and call of God at all times; they cited God's command to Moses in Deuteronomy 5:28 (Midrash Exodus Rabbah 19:3 and 46.3).[4]

The weight of Scriptural evidence therefore suggests that, from motives of both holy fear (of illicitly touching the New Ark) and of love for God in imitation of Moses, Joseph realized he had been charged with foregoing marital relations in this wonderful and special case. Once again, Scripture winds up reflecting the Tradition preserved by the Church.

John's Witness to Mary's Perpetual Virginity

Another point also deserves mention. Suppose, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Mary did give birth to other children besides Jesus. What, then, are we to make of the fact that Jesus, in His final moments of earthly life, gives Mary into John's care?

When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:26-27)

As Paul makes clear, both Jews and Christians customarily entrusted the care of widows to their own families:

Honor widows who are real widows. If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn their religious duty to their own family and make some return to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God. She who is a real widow, and is left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day; whereas she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives. Command this, so that they may be without reproach. If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Timothy 5:3-8)

Caring for one's widowed mother was not regarded as some sort of extraordinary or saintly duty, any more than it regarded that way today. It was regarded as one of the things that anybody calling themselves "human" was expected to do.

So, if Mary really had other children, why was she commended into the care of John and not, say, of James "the Lord's brother"? Some will argue Jesus chose John because he was a believer and James was not. But the reality is that John was not much more of a believer than James at this point. Scripture notes John's confusion at the Resurrection—which he neither expected nor believed at first (Mark 16:11)—and Scripture is clear that John had not yet received the Spirit, since the Spirit had not yet been given (John 7:39). Of course, as we know, John came to full faith in Christ shortly thereafter. But then again, so did James (1 Corinthians 15:7). So if James, not to mention all the other supposed "siblings" such as Jude, aren't only believers but siblings of Jesus, why did Jesus entrust Mary to John? The obvious inference is that James, Jude, and the rest were not the Blessed Virgin's children.

The Witness of the Prophets

Given the witness of Mary, Joseph, the Evangelists, and Jesus Himself, it's not surprising to find the early Church Fathers firmly embracing the belief that Mary was ever-virgin. They too recognized the connection between Mary and the Ark, and saw in Mary's Perpetual Virginity something that attends everything else about Jesus' life—the fulfillment of prophecy. This is most notable in the Fathers' reading of the prophet Ezekiel.

Ezekiel lived about 500 years before Christ. In Ezekiel's day, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel had been scattered by the Assyrian Empire (hence the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel") while the southern "rump" kingdom of Judah had itself been carted off to captivity in Babylon after the destruction of Solomon's Temple. It seemed Israel was doomed to be annihilated, crushed between the hammer of Assyria and the anvil of Babylon.

But then God raised up prophets like Ezekiel to promise that Israel had not been forsaken and that the Almighty would restore her fortunes, return her to her land, send her a Messiah, and use Israel to bless all the nations of the earth, just as He had promised Abraham long ago (Genesis 12:1-3). In Ezekiel's case, this prophetic message included a lengthy vision—recorded in Ezekiel 40-48—describing a restored Temple, a revived land of Israel and a renewed city of Jerusalem.

Now the Temple was indeed rebuilt (cf. Ezra and Nehemiah), but it didn't (and couldn't) look like the Temple of Ezekiel's prophecy. Why? Because in Ezekiel's visionary Temple things like this happen:

Then he brought me back to the door of the temple; and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me round on the outside to the outer gate, that faces toward the east; and the water was coming out on the south side.

Going on eastward with a line in his hand, the man measured a thousand cubits, and then led me through the water; and it was ankle-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water; and it was knee-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water; and it was up to the loins. Again he measured a thousand, and it was a river that I could not pass through, for the water had risen; it was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be passed through. And he said to me, "Son of man, have you seen this?"

Then he led me back along the bank of the river. As I went back, I saw upon the bank of the river very many trees on the one side and on the other. And he said to me, "This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the stagnant waters of the sea, the water will become fresh. And wherever the river goes every living creature which swarms will live, and there will be very many fish; for this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes. Fishermen will stand beside the sea; from En-gedi to En-eglaim it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of very many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing."(Ezekiel 47:1-12)

There never was (and never will be) a physical Temple with a river flowing out of it. So what is Ezekiel getting at? To find out, we must pay attention to a rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth as He comes to the rebuilt Temple 500 years later to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7).

The Feast of Tabernacles is described in Leviticus 23:33-43 and Deuteronomy 16:13-16 as a commemoration of Israel's living in tents in the wilderness (Leviticus 23:43) and a thanksgiving for Israel's permanent home in the Promised Land. In addition, the Feast also offers thanks for the Temple, the successor of the Mosaic Tabernacle (Exodus 25-31) as a permanent place of worship. Note that both the Tabernacle and the Temple were home to the Ark of the Covenant until the Ark vanished several centuries before Christ's birth.

As Israel wandered in the wilderness during the Exodus, the people suffered from thirst. In answer to their complaints, Moses strikes a rock, from which water flows to quench Israel's thirst (Numbers 20). By Jesus' day this event was commemorated in the Feast of Tabernacles in a curious ritual: Every morning during the Feast, a priest went down to the Pool of Siloam and brought back a golden pitcher of water to the Temple (the successor of Moses' Tabernacle). This water was poured on the altar of holocausts amidst the singing of the "Hallel" (that is, Psalms 112-117) and the joyful sound of musical instruments. Interestingly, this practice became part of the Feast after the rebuilding of the Temple following the Babylonian Exile—that is, after the prophecy of Ezekiel's river flowing from the Temple.

So, during the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus announces to the crowd, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water'" (John 7:37-38). As we already know, Jesus uses the image of living water to refer to the Holy Spirit (cf. John 4). Yet curiously, there's no passage in Old Testament Scripture which says, "Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water". What then is Jesus referring to?

He is referring to Ezekiel 47 and following. After all, Jesus has already told us what the true Temple is when he declared, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." (John 2:19). As John makes crystal clear, "[H]e spoke of the temple of his body" (John 2:21). So Jesus is declaring to all at the Feast of Tabernacles that Ezekiel's vision is not a physical description of a stone building, but a spiritual description of the True Temple, the Body of Christ. For the same reason, John says that Jesus "tabernacled" among us (John 1:14) when he became man. Paul makes the same connection, referring to the mystical Body of Christ as the Temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

What then is Jesus' point? He is identifying Himself with the Temple of Ezekiel's vision. He is making clear that He is the True Temple and His heart is the Holy of Holies. The waters of the Feast of Tabernacles, the water flowing from the rock of Moses, from the rock on which the visionary Temple of Ezekiel is founded, flows from His heart. The Rock, as Paul makes clear, is Christ (1 Corinthians 10:1-4). And, as we shall see presently, John will make this even clearer as his Gospel reaches its climax.

In other words, the Incarnation is being likened to God coming to dwell in His Temple in majesty. Or rather, the Old Testament moments in which God descended in majesty on the Tabernacle and the Temple in the pillar of cloud (cf. Exodus 40:34-38; 1 Kings 8:10-11) are revealed to be prophetic foreshadows of when God truly came to dwell in His Temple: when the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.

Now the interesting thing, the Fathers noticed, is that Ezekiel speaks directly to this image of the Lord coming in majesty to dwell in His Temple. For the prophet wrote:

Then he brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut. And he said to me, "This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut." (Ezekiel 44:1-2).

In short, the Gate into the Incarnation (i.e., Mary) shall be holy to the Lord and not for any common purpose. And in token of this, the Gate of the Mystical Temple shall be shut to all but the Lord.

As an Evangelical, I had long regarded the reading of Ezekiel 44:1-2 to support Mary's Perpetual Virginity as mere "proof-texting." I thought the Fathers were beginning with this passage and then trying to build a doctrine of Perpetual Virginity on it. But the more I saw how the early Church (including the New Testament authors) linked the Tabernacle, the Temple and the Body of Christ, and the roles of Mary, the Ark, and the gate of Temple, the more I came to realize that the Church's faith in Mary's Perpetual Virginity was not derived from Ezekiel 44:1-2 any more than her faith in the Virgin Birth was derived from Isaiah 7:14. Rather, as with the Virgin Birth, the Perpetual Virginity of Mary happened, and only afterwards did the Church begin to realize that the events of her life, like the events of her Son's, were strangely—one might even say prophetically—foreshadowed in Ezekiel 44:1-2. And so there dawned on me at last the recognition of a real, organic un-manufactured connection between Mary and something the prophet Ezekiel was inspired to see.

The Witness of the Fathers and the Church

Patristic sources who affirm that Mary's Perpetual Virginity was taught by the Apostles include the author of the Protoevangelium of James, Origen, Hilary of Poitiers, Athanasius, Epiphanius of Salamis, Jerome, Didymus the Blind, Ambrose of Milan, Pope Siricius I, Augustine, Leporius, Cyril of Alexandria, Pope Leo I, and the dogmatic teaching of Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. And they're only the beginning. For the entirety of Christian history until roughly the 17th Century, Christians agreed with them—except for two guys.

Those two guys are:

· Tertullian. A fierce North African lawyer and defender of the Faith who lived in the late-second and early-third century. He fell prey to a spiritual disease that sometimes afflicts those who come to love apologetics more than they love Jesus: Tertullian got so intent on building up antibodies against heresy that he eventually contracted a sort of spiritual auto-immune disease and started building antibodies against the Body of Christ itself. Eventually, he abandoned Christianity for Montanism. But along the way, Tertullian wrote some brilliant—and virulent—stuff. He did nothing by halves, and he was no stranger to the deep end when it came to contradicting his opponents. And so, when he encountered Docetists (people who denied Jesus was truly human) Tertullian countered by arguing that not only was Jesus human, but His mother, being herself fully human, must have had a bushel of other kids too! True to form, Tertullian didn't argue this from biblical evidence (because, as we've seen, there isn't any) but from his own polemical needs at the moment. In fact, Tertullian's passionate opposition to Docetism also prompted him to argue that Jesus was ugly! He was an extremist with an axe to grind and a blinding need to win an argument at any cost, not a very reliable witness to the constant faith of other
Christians.

· Helvidius, who lived in the fourth century. He wrote a pamphlet (lost to history) which argued most of the same things Evangelicals argue against Mary's Perpetual Virginity. How does Helvidius know Mary had other kids? He doesn't. He just cites Tertullian and says that it seems to him she must have had them, using all the misreadings of Scripture we have just looked at and discredited.

It's worth noting that when Jerome wrote his famous refutation Against Helvidius in defense of Mary's Perpetual Virginity, his argument was seen by his all contemporaries as completely non-controversial: It was Helvidius who was universally regarded throughout Christendom as the kook. Jerome's view was regarded as simply normal by Christians everywhere. And that remained true right down through the Reformation, whose leading lights such as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and even John Wesley, also accepted Mary's Perpetual Virginity as clear and unarguable biblical teaching. Far from "contradicting" Scripture, the dogma of Mary's Perpetual Virginity is at least as well-attested, both biblically and historically, as the dogma of the Trinity.

Hope that helps!

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Grail

Unless you are Sandra Miesel, who knows everything there is to know about medieval arcana.

Am I the only one who finds this to be a weirdly constructed sentence?

"Kopp is charged [under federal law] with obstructing access to an abortion clinic through his slaying of Slepian, a charge that carries a mandatory life sentence."

Evangelical Reader Tom R, Emerging from His Rip Van Winkle Sleep of Centuries, writes below:

Well, Mike, for example, do you believe that your Baptist brother-in-law (everyone who comboxes at CEI has a Baptist brother-in-law) should "suffer the penalties prescribed by law" if he publicly professes that "Mary was a virgin until Jesus was born"? That's from an explicitly infallible statement by a Pope, so there's very little wiggle room to Unam Sanctam-ise that one. So go on, say it loud, say it proud: "My Baptist brother-in-law should go to jail for denying the Perpetual Virginity or the Immaculate Conception."

Allow me to be the first to welcome Tom to the 21st Century and to get him oriented to the realities of life in the Catholic communion as it presently stands. It turns out that that canonical penalities have always been mutable, Tom. And so, as the relationship between Church and state evolved over the centuries, it no longer occurs that the Church hands people over to the secular arm for punishment for canonical offenses. Indeed, while your were sleeping, an important Council was held in the 1960s in which the Church definitively developed its doctrine on the question of religious liberty. It was called the Second Vatican Council.

Tomorrow, we will talk about refrigerators and the internal combustion engine.

CE Triple Threat

My latest, in which we learn that the Church's sexual teaching actually makes sense

Greg Krehbiel being his typically not-full-of-crap and refreshingly clear self

Eric Scheske is learning ever so much from Modern Scientific Research

One Might Also Call it "Suiciding the Church"

...since not a few lay Catholics seem to either not know, nor care, or else to be positively enthused at the prospect that the Great Enema is now morphing into a persecution of the Church that seeks to completely destroy its institutional structures in the pursuit of lining pockets. Do Catholics know--do they care?--that the Church is being singled out for things like exemption from statutes of limitations, just so it can be the more effectively pillaged by lawyers without a care in the world for the common good?

Consider, in a *single year* 1998, the Dept of Justice listed 103,600 cases of sexual abuse in public schools. From 1950 to 2003, there were 10,667 reported cases of clergy sexual abuse. That's 10 times as much in one year as there were in 53 years in the Church. Yet nobody is passing laws singling out teachers for special exemption from ordinary laws. Only Catholics.

Some Catholics appear to be drunk on Avenging Angel juice and simply don't care. But sane laity are damn well going to have to care or the simple fact is this: the pillaging of the Church will not stop until your parish is gone, all the services it provided are gone, schools are gone, orphanages, hospitals, charities, clinics, and the thousand and one other corporal works of mercy are stamped out by a system that sees the chance to make a bundle and doesn't a damn about the poor the Church serves.

The Church itself will survive, of course. But the ruin inflicted on a society that has no clue how dependent it is on the Catholic Church as a mediating institution may mean that our country doesn't survive. The Church has a divine promise of survival. US culture is only as strong as the mortals that comprise it.

Bottom line: Destruction is not reform. Catholics who are sitting there thinking, "Ha! The Church is getting what it deserves!" are, quite simply, candidates for discovering the principle that the measure you give will be the measure you receive. And they are wrong to boot. The Church is the People of God. And the People of God do not deserve to have their patrimony pillaged by greedy lawyers who leave them naked before the power of a persecuting state and powerless to help those members of society even more helpless than they will be once this legal pogrom really gets up its head of steam.

Wake up!

Belated ANZAC Day Greetings to My Friends in Australia and New Zealand

For you Yanks, ANZAC Day honors Australian & NZ Army Corps who died in battle, or from the result of war, from the Boer War, WW 1 & 2, Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the latest - an Aussie killed in Iraq the other day.

God bless them for their sacrifice. May it be reckoned to their glory on That Day.

Red State Minions are Not Acting with Proper Deference to Blue State Schools

...and that's a very good thing.

Those Wacky Spanish Socialists

You know, senors y senoras, an unborn baby has a *100%* genetic match with a human being. Do the math.

Court Repeals Free Exercise Clause--For Now

Just testing. It will take successive waves of such decisions to reach up the beach to the SCOTUS. But over the long haul, our cultural elites are laboring toward the day they can stamp out free exercise for Christians.

Another Christian Communion becomes a Whore for the Culture of Death

Why not just fry human embryos up and eat them? That form of tissue harvest is *sure* to help keep people alive and we don't even have to do research to know that.

Despicable.

Another Chance to Do Good to the Least of These

The phrase "least of these" is an awfully dicey one. Our Lord uses it and it's entered common usage through the Bible, but in the context he uses it (contrasting his glorious kingship at the Second Coming with the apparent mundaneness of our little acts of charity) it's fitting. I sometimes wonder if it's appropriate for creatures like me to use, because it could easily be taken to imply that I'm the Star and those people over there are the nameless security guards and extras in the Great Film of Life. If it has that effect, it's just evil to use it.

This seems like one of those questions Disputations should take up. Over to you, Tom.

Thin-Skinned Bronze Age Muslim Thugs Discover the Cyrano Principle

In Cyrano de Bergerac, the following exchange occurs:

THE VISCOUNT:
I'll treat him to. . .one of my quips!. . .See here!. . .
(He goes up to Cyrano, who is watching him, and with a conceited air):
Sir, your nose is. . .hmm. . .it is. . .very big!

CYRANO (gravely):
Very!

THE VISCOUNT (laughing):
Ha!

CYRANO (imperturbably):
Is that all?. . .

THE VISCOUNT:
What do you mean?

CYRANO:
Ah no! young blade! That was a trifle short!
You might have said at least a hundred things
By varying the tone. . .like this, suppose,. . .
Aggressive: 'Sir, if I had such a nose
I'd amputate it!' Friendly: 'When you sup
It must annoy you, dipping in your cup;
You need a drinking-bowl of special shape!'
Descriptive: ''Tis a rock!. . .a peak!. . .a cape!
--A cape, forsooth! 'Tis a peninsular!'
Curious: 'How serves that oblong capsular?
For scissor-sheath? Or pot to hold your ink?'
Gracious: 'You love the little birds, I think?
I see you've managed with a fond research
To find their tiny claws a roomy perch!'
Truculent: 'When you smoke your pipe. . .suppose
That the tobacco-smoke spouts from your nose--
Do not the neighbors, as the fumes rise higher,
Cry terror-struck: "The chimney is afire"?'
Considerate: 'Take care,. . .your head bowed low
By such a weight. . .lest head o'er heels you go!'
Tender: 'Pray get a small umbrella made,
Lest its bright color in the sun should fade!'
Pedantic: 'That beast Aristophanes
Names Hippocamelelephantoles
Must have possessed just such a solid lump
Of flesh and bone, beneath his forehead's bump!'
Cavalier: 'The last fashion, friend, that hook?
To hang your hat on? 'Tis a useful crook!'
Emphatic: 'No wind, O majestic nose,
Can give THEE cold!--save when the mistral blows!'
Dramatic: 'When it bleeds, what a Red Sea!'
Admiring: 'Sign for a perfumery!'
Lyric: 'Is this a conch?. . .a Triton you?'
Simple: 'When is the monument on view?'
Rustic: 'That thing a nose? Marry-come-up!
'Tis a dwarf pumpkin, or a prize turnip!'
Military: 'Point against cavalry!'
Practical: 'Put it in a lottery!
Assuredly 'twould be the biggest prize!'
Or. . .parodying Pyramus' sighs. . .
'Behold the nose that mars the harmony
Of its master's phiz! blushing its treachery!'
--Such, my dear sir, is what you might have said,
Had you of wit or letters the least jot:
But, O most lamentable man!--of wit
You never had an atom, and of letters
You have three letters only!--they spell Ass!
And--had you had the necessary wit,
To serve me all the pleasantries I quote
Before this noble audience. . .e'en so,
You would not have been let to utter one--
Nay, not the half or quarter of such jest!
I take them from myself all in good part,
But not from any other man that breathes!

Briefly stated, then there are three basic principles in life: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. And never, ever, try to make fun of the ethnic group that has given the world more self-deprecating comic geniuses than anyone else on the planet--especially if your own tribe is bunch of humorless stentorian dorks.

A Common Conservative Evangelical Blunder

This fellow writes:

Easter has become one of the most holy Christian celebrations. However, it is not found anywhere in the Bible. My family celebrates Easter every year. But, we have always maintained a careful awareness of its meaning. I don't believe that most have done this. I believe that knowing the pagan roots of Holy observances is key to maintaining purity in one's worship.

Easter? Most don't even know the origin of the name! Two pagan goddesses were the source. Estere was a pagan fertility goddess and Ishtar (an Old Testament pagan goddess that rose with the sunrise). Female deities, the rabbit and egg have represented pagan fertility celebrations for milleniums.

The problem is obvious. Holy observances that have been leached forward to convert pagans to Christianity many centuries ago have some inherently dangerous undertones. His death and resurrection should be celebrated - but, His supreme sacrifice should be observed everyday, not when the moon is lined-up correctly with the earth (Easter's celebration is ted to the spring equinox - the actual date is set as the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs after the spring equinox). Let the kids enjoy Easter...but, you might consider telling them its just for fun.

Now for some facts:

1. Easter is most certainly found in the Bible. The first one is in all four gospels. I don't know why there is a superstition about marking it with an annual feast but not about marking our birthdays with annual feasts.

2. Re: "I don't believe most have done this." It is characteristic of a certain sort of Conservative Evangelical to really believe that the vast majority of Christians could have no idea what Easter is about. Certainly there are non-Christians with only a passing familiarity with the great feasts of the Church. But Catholics (that is to say, "most Christians") are familiar with them. Indeed, I would bet that even the most clueless Catholic--even an ex-Catholic who says "I was raised Catholic..."--would know that Easter is about the Resurrection of Christ. I also bet that most Catholics would say, "Who?" if you confronted them with the names "Eostre" or "Ishtar". For the Evangelical petrified of pagan defilement, that just proves how brainwashed the pagan Catholics are. For people who give the question a moment's thought, that just proves how fear of pagan defilement addles some Evangelical brains. After all, if you send your kid to learn their Communist catechism for four years and they come out able to tell you nothing about the Bolshevik Revolution or Marx, but everything about George Washington , the chances are pretty high that they haven't gotten a very good brainwashing in Communism. Likewise, if Catholics have no clue about pagan goddesses but can tell you what Easter is about, that probably means you need to re-evaluate the deleterious effects of words like "Easter".

3. Speaking of which, it's true that the name comes from a Germanic fertility goddess (Eostre). It's bunk that the name has anything to do with Ishtar. And the real kicker is, it's only an issue for Germanic language groups. Indeed, even Orthodox English speakers tend to call it by its more traditional name: Pascha.

4. This brings us to the core issue: The "semi-Manichaean hue" of Evangelicalism that Thomas Howard lamented years ago in his brilliant book Evangelical is Not Enough. For some reason, not a few Evangelicals tend to regard Nature as pagan property. So if a pagan uses a bunny or an egg or the dawn as a symbol, then Christians can't use it. It's a silly notion that totally overlooks both the Creation and the Incarnation. God hold the copyright on sunrises, bunnies and eggs, not Eostre. So it's perfectly fine for these obvious symbols of hope and new life to represent, well, Hope and New Life.

5. Next, we encounter a peculiar sample of the classic Protestant either/or habit of mind: "His supreme sacrifice should be observed everyday, not when the moon is lined-up correctly with the earth". Personally, I think both/and is the better approach here. I also think that just as matter and space should be hallowed as the redeemed creatures of the Incarnate God, so time should be thought of as sacred too since God entered into it. So referring to Holy Week (which is, after all, rooted in the biblical concept of Creation Week, as well as God's massive work of self-revelation in the mystery of the covenant with Israel and the Passover) as a mere "time coordinate" ("when the moon is lined-up correctly with the earth") is to overlook something vital in the biblical account.

6. And finally, I'm baffled by the weird conclusion: "...you might consider telling them its just for fun". Or you might consider telling them that this is commemoration of the Great Miracle and a graced time. Are there other graced times? Of course. Are all times graced in a certain sense. Yes.

But lemme ask you this: Jesus was invisibly present with the disciples in the Upper Room the whole time Mary Magdalene was telling them she'd seen Him. You gonna tell there was no difference between that mode of Presence and his visible appearance on Easter? Then don't tell me there aren't specially graced times and places. As C.S. Lewis says somewhere, "The God whom we would not know as present everywhere saved us by becoming local."

Dawn Eden Gets a Threefer on her Blog!

First, she meets an absolutely hilarious pack of Cyber-Sisters .

Second, they do a really fetching impression of the Four Yorkshiremen ("You think *you* had it tough? Why, when *I* was raised Catholic...")

And third, of course, they once again bear out Shea's Sixth Immutable Law of Internet Discourse

It's a classic case of Catholics who look upon the faith as a kind of ethnicity. The faith of Dawn's critic is gone, but the dessicated remains of snobbery remain, as though they somehow had the idea that "her kind" (those damned earnest Evangelicals!) would lower the property value. There goes the neighborhood!

The strange thing is that, like so many ex-Catholics who claim to have left the neighborhood, they continue to linger around, throwing rocks at their old House and spray painting the walls in the middle of the night. They're not obsessed or Christ-haunted or anything though. Nothing's eating them. Nosirree.

The Cultural Imperialism of the Quixotically Wishful

Get Religion points out the absurd flaw at the heart of our Governing and Chattering Class attempts to cope with the hard realities of Islam. The Chattering classes makes their closest approach to reality when they recognize that Islam, like virtually religious traditions, has no magisterium and is therefore subject to wildly differing interpretations from wildly differing imams.

The problem is, both they and the other principal manufacturers of public though--the governing classes--can't bear to really face what that means: which is that several million Muslims really *do* subscribe to or sympathize with the methods and aims of ruthless Bronze Age Fanatics who think nothing at all of murdering whole populations if it furthers their aims for global domination.

Nope. Instead, our Manufacturers of Public Discourse simply contradict themselves and pronounce on what Islam "essentially" is: it's a "religion of peace".

At this point, I seriously doubt most average Americans believe this doublespeak. Repeated beheadings and cartoon riots do have a way of taking the lustre off your reputation for Oriental courtesy and Salaam-filled magnanimity. But then again, one can never under-estimate the capacity of people desperate for comfort to lie to themselves in the pursuit of it.

The smart thing to do would be to clearly acknowledge that Islam is not a religion of peace: it is a religion of intense civil war in which one faction has dreams of defeating and destroying their sane co-religionists and then marching on to destroy and conquer the rest of the world, not unlike the conflict between the sane people and the Bolsheviks. Then we could assist the sane people and not help swell the ranks of the crazies.

But instead we either pretend there are no crazies or we deliberately provoke and insult the sacred beliefs of ordinary Muslims so that they conclude, "The Radicals are right. The Depraved West really does hate all I hold dear." This stupidly suicidal behavior is, well, what you might expect from a culture of death that seems bent on hiring Islam as an assassin to kill it, like some insane millionaire in a noir film. But as a person who dissents from the culture of death, I'd just like to go on record as saying that I would prefer to remain alive and free. The first step for doing so is the virtue of prudence, which means "understanding what is so and ordering our actions accordingly". What is so is that Islam is profoundly divided. For some, it is a religion of peace. For a great many, it is the vehicle for all their basest sins of murder, arrogance, and evil. I hope our Manufacturers of Public Discourse get that through their heads soon.

Here's a chance to help one of the Least of These

Attention J Schoolers!

If you are going to be a successful reporter, you will need to be armed with certain cliches. In the past, terms like "flamboyant" and "homosexual" were stitched together all the time. Now only Dan Brown can get away with that. So who says there's not an upside to the gay rights movement?

But in talking about religion, there is still a wonderful number of opportunity to cobble together whole articles out of tired phrases that don't even have anything to do with reality.

Here's a typical MSM headline:

"Vatican Cracks Down on Devout Catholics in Bus Plunge: Hardliner Pope Takes Rigidly Orthodox Position Against Vehicular Homicide"

Look real hard. See if you can spot cliched writing. Now see if you can think of other samples of cliches when it comes to religion writing. If you can think of more than three, you are probably better qualified to write about the Catholic faith than 90% of the people reporting on it in the MSM today! Feel free to use the combox to list off some weatherbeaten MSM religion cliches.

Good interview with Ramesh Ponnuru on his new book "The Party of Death"

I like the guy a lot. We've corresponded from time to time and he impresses me as having the integrity, not only to stand up for human life against the enthusiasts for its diminishment and extermination in the Evil Party, but also to criticize those on the Right who make excuses for assaults on the dignity of the human person for the Security of the Fatherland. It's good to see a Catholic taking his faith seriously inside the Beltway.

Oh, and before my Lefty readers even start: please note that Ponnuru makes a very clear distinction between the "Party of Death" and the Dem Party. He does state the blindingly obvious *fact* that the Dem Party has allowed itself to be taken over and utterly dominated by the Party of Death, which only a fool could deny what with the robotic devotion of the Dem party to the sacrament of abortion, fetal harvesting, stem cell research, and putting the aged and infirm to death as quickly as possible. The GOP's enthusiasms for torture and capital punishment at least have the thin excuse that they are pursued in some sort of mood of civil defense against real threats (however wretched that excuse is for torture and however fruitless it is for capital punishment). But the Dem Party has been squarely on the side of the murder of perfectly innocent human beings by the millions for over 30 years. Even so, Ponnuru, rather magnanimously in my view, does not claim the Dems and the Party of Death are co-terminous (conscious as he is of the universality of original sin). And (what is most important) he hopes for the day when the Dems and our culture will throw off their enslavement to the party of death. So do I.

It was kind of weird. Recently I was somewhere or other, having just corresponded with him earlier in the day, and I turned on the tube in my hotel room only to see that the poor guy had somehow managed to get dragooned into guesting on Bill Maher's show. It was illiterate raunch and blasphemy from beginning to end with Ponnuru scarcely getting a word in edgewise while Maher and two unidentified sub-humans threw the howling mob hunks of red Catholic meat. I felt for the guy. He must have needed a shower when it was over.

The Whapsters Find Irrefutable Evidence of Time-Travelling United Federation of Planets Spacecraft



Look like that debate has been definitively settled.

Oh, and check out the brilliant summary of What Grownup Catholics Talk about and What the MSM Hears. The title of the blog entry says it all (if you remember your Far Side cartoons).

Remember: the Whapsters are the future. Dick McBrien and similar geezers are the rapidly receding past.

Shea's Sixth Immutable Law of Internet Discourse Receives Further Confirmation

Shea's Sixth Immutable Law of Internet Discourse states: "Whenever any ex-Catholic begins a sentence with "I was raised Catholic and I can tell you that Catholics believe..." what follows will be a farrago of ignorant nonsense." Peter Sean Bradley provides the details on his close encounter with this phenomenon.

Alright! I'm going to get a *root canal* now!

Attitude is everything.

Andrew Sullivan Continues His Quest to Create a Jesus Who Approves of Everything He Does and Who Defends Him from the Big Bad Catholic Church

To that end, he quotes an article that has one truth and an almost perfect storm of lies to support his pre-ordained agenda disguised as a "search". The truth is that, yes, Jesus is not a character anybody would ever have invented. True enough. The thing is, the only reason we know about him (as well as about the horrendous flaws of his disciples) is that the Church had a damn sight more integrity than Andrew Sullivan and told the truth about Jesus (even leaving in uncomfortable sayings like "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and Peter's denial) rather than create a Jesus that affirmed them in their okayness as Sullivan demands. Imagine Sullivan making sure to record that Jesus once called him "Satan" as Peter made sure it was recorded. Fat chance. As for the rest of this predictable bit of post-Christian pap, allow me to fisk:

If Jesus Christ had not existed, it would almost certainly not have been necessary for the Church to invent someone like him. What does the Church want with a man who plainly despised ritual?

This, unfortunately, is what you get when people know nothing of the New Testament. Jesus was a Jew. he practiced ritual because every Jew practiced ritual. He had no problem celebrating the ritual feasts of the Old Testament (recall that the Last Supper was a Passover). In fact, John builds his whole gospel around the feasts of the Old Testament, relating them to various aspects of the revelation of Christ. Jesus also had not problem with establishing rituals ("Go into all the world, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" "Do this in memory of me.") That's because Jesus was handing on a revelation he intended to last more than a couple of weeks. And the way you do that is through ritual. The author doesn't realize it (they never do) but the swipe at the Church for being "ritualistic" basically is a swipe at Judaism, not Christianity. To be sure, Jesus warned against *empty* ritual--as did the prophets. But against ritual per se he spoke not a word.

Can you imagine the man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey wanting anything to do with bells and smells and frocks, with gilt and silver and semi-idolatry, and repetitive chants and chorused inanities?

Can you imagine this writer having the slightest acquaintance with the incense, shofars, gold, silver and bronze trimmings of the Tabernacle and the Temple (commanded by God himself) and with the priestly garments given "for beauty and for glory" to the Aaronic high priest as a sign that he was being clothed by God as a sign of God's favor to all Israel? Can you imagine this writer having the slightest clue that the *reason* Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem was that Solomon, the most gorgeous king in Israel's history, had done exactly the same thing a thousand years previously and this was Jesus' way of making clear that he was the rightful heir to throne of David? Can you imagine this writer having the slightest notion that the book of Psalms is *filled* with "repetitive chants and chorused inanities" or, as literate people call them, hymns of praise to God?

The man who said he had come to break up families being paraded as a paradigm of family values?

That the gospel divides families is not something Jesus regards as a blessing, but as a tragedy, like the doctor who says, "I won't lie to you. This is going to hurt." That this writer does not recognize this and ignored Jesus' emphatic teaching about the goodness and indissolubility of marriage between man and woman (Matthew 19), not to mention his blessing on children and his warning against those who harm them (a warning that extends not just to abusive priests but to those who would wantonly destroy their homes through sins like adultery) speaks volumes about the author's hostility to family and nothing about Jesus.

When we consider all those painfully counter-intuitive sayings and parables - the Prodigal Son, the idea that it is no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad, the impatience with good works ('the poor always ye have with you') except as a means for personal purification - and when we consider how Jesus keeps saying ... the wrong thing, it becomes even clearer that he must have been real: if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented someone so much more convenient."

Where to begin? It's bunk to claim that Jesus said it "no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad." It's a great good to resist temptation. But it's a great evil to court hatred or lust in your heart. Only you know if you are courting or resisting temptation, but any idiot (except this writer and Andrew Sullivan) knows there's a difference between courting and resisting temptation. As to the "impatience with good works" perhaps a remedial reading of the parable of the sheep and the goats or the parable of the Good Samaritan will help this writer get a sense of what the real Jesus had to say on such matters. The absurd citation of "the poor you have with you always" is as illiterate as the rest of his New Testament exegesis. The point has nothing to do with "personal purification" nor with a general contempt for good works: it's a rather forlorn prophecy of his coming death and a deeply human word of gratitude for somebody who took a little time to notice what he was facing: "She has anointed me in advance for my burial." In the gospel, *everything* orbits around that fact. That the writer does not see this tells me that he thinks like Andrew Sullivan--for whom everything orbits around Andrew Sullivan and what Andrew wants.

That said, I repeat, it is true that the Church would never have invented Jesus. Sadly, however, Andrew and his friend do not draw the logical conclusion from this: that the Jesus the Church preaches is, in fact, the real Jesus. Instead, Andrew and Co. just plow stupidly on, trying to invent a Jesus more to their liking and utterly ignorant of the one the Church's gospels give us.

I'm Likin' this New Canadian Prime Minister More All the Time

Live Long and Prosper.

Orwell in Action

It used to be called "end of life" care. Now it's called "futile" care. With Terri Schiavo, the excuse for murdering her was "the family" (meaning her adulterous husband) "wanted it". Here they don't even have that excuse. The family doesn't want it, but the hospital bean counters want it.

Oh, and big heaps o' thanks to Our Most Pro-Life President Ever for making this possible.

"The recent proceedings at the High Court offered the first clues as to how Dan Brown produced the publishing sensation that is The Da Vinci Code."

If you think you're going to hear anything about Brown's shoddy research, his lame "blame the wife" testimony, or anything about the judge's tart remarks on Brown's vaunted pretensions to impeccable research, give it up. This is a puff piece on how the Great Man does such brilliant work at the "craft of writing". He's like a fine musician, doncha know.

However, on the bright side, the unflagging Sandra Miesel *has* read the court case and will be providing a fine fillet of the Great Fraud for Crisis soon. Should be wicked fun.

Speaking of Rome...

Progressives and Reactionaries are all atwitter because Rome is apparently studying the question of condoms for spouses with AIDS. In an unconscious illustration of the way in which both presumption and despair are the enemies of hope, Progressives are cheering that it's a done deal that "Rome is finally catching up with the 21st century" and Reactionaries are freaking out that Rome is about to betray the Faith.

Sheesh. It's a *study*. And the point of a study is to *learn* something. In this case, the thing being learned and pondered is not "Shall we abandon the Tradition so as to please MTV?" but "Does the principle of double effect apply here?" Progressives, who have no interest in or knowledge the Tradition at all can hardly be expected to have considered this, for the same reason that five year olds can hardly be expected to think like adults. But Reactionaries, who at least *claim* to care about the Tradition, should really be aware that the Church is constantly revisiting old questions. Or did you not know that there was a time when the term "homoousious" was actually condemned by a local council of the Church? That's one of the reasons the Arians argued to reject it at Nicaea. But guess what? The Church revisited the question and accepted the term anyway (along with a different definition of what the term meant).

My point: the reason we have a Magisterium is that the Church is our Teacher as well as our Mother. Most American Catholics, however, think and act exactly like Protestants when some sacred cow of theirs is (they fear) threatened. Instead of waiting to find out what the Church's teachers--who have forgotten more about moral theology than you or I will ever learn--will say, we leap to all sorts of presumptive and despairing conclusions and declare, "Whatever they say, I know what *I* think and I'm not listening to these [Retrograde Neanderthals/Modernist Apostates] (Choose one).

Me: I have not given five seconds' thought to the question of condoms for married spouses with AIDS. Not a problem on my immediate horizon. I'm quite willing to listen to whatever the study (and remember, it's just a study) concludes. If the Church says it meets the criteria of double-effect, that works for me, cuz what do I know about it? Meanwhile, the only person I've run across who's posed a real world problem with this whole matter is Kathy Shaidle, who asks with her native common sense: "If my husband got AIDS by cheating on me, using dirty needles or having sex with a guy last week or last century, why the crap would I want to have sex with him again anyway?"

One real question is worth all the conclusion-leaping presumption and despair in the world.

What exactly *is* the Holy See's View of the Holy Land?

Now you know.

This is a clip and save article for the next time the Holy See says something about the Holy Land. Odds are, it will be a reflection of the basic ideas outlined here.

Virtuous Pagan Shows Himself Open to the Truth

I have much more respect for an honest pagan (having been one myself at one point) than I do for a quisling (pronounced "Kissling") Christian. More power to him! May God continue to guide him to further light.

Chris Blosser does the Total DVC Roundup

But enough of this light and fluffy theology...

Let's talk about scientific studies of why Rice Krispies snap, crackle, and pop.

Speaking of Rod...

He understands what love of country actually means. It means love of country, not love of an abstraction.

And finally, while I am on a Rod-debauch, let me note that it has also occurred to me (actually, it occurred to me ten years ago, when I wrote By What Authority?) that having to do battle with people like the Jesus Seminar and Dan Brown is the penance that anti-Catholic Protestants must do to atone for the various lies they told to justify their anti-Catholicism. Dan Brown is, after all, simply regurgitating the same sort of crap Loraine Boettner did. Except he is making the (perfectly logical) leap from 16th Century Protestantism to 2nd Century Protestantism and saying, "If Christians after the Seven Councils could just decide for themselves who Jesus was and what the faith is, then why couldn't anybody claiming to follow Jesus *always* do that?" Good question.

The Catholic faith has a response. It's called Sacred Tradition and apostolic succession. Evangelicalism's response (judging from my experience in Hollywood last week) is either "Tell people your personal story about how Jesus changed your life" or "What is truth? Let us be open to diversity! 42 million DVC readers can't be wrong!" I have a modicum of respect for the first response. The gospels are, after all, accounts of how Jesus changed people's lives. Personal witness does count for something. But personal witness that is not rooted in the awareness that we are saved *as. a. people* and that the Church is prior to us and not about our personal preference and notions of what the gospel should be is ultimately doomed.

As to the second response, I have basically nothing but contempt for it. It's a naked capitulation to the dictatorship of relativism.

My hope, bolstered by the response of the audience at the Hollywood do, is that most Evangelicals are as dissatisfied with these weak-tea responses as I was and want to have something more solid to underpin their faith. Several people remarked on the fact that they didn't know anything about Church history and that this was why the DVC was so hard for them. They're perfectly right, of course. For many Evangelical, Church history begins with Jesus, pauses with the death of John, enters a vast parenthesis with something about pagans, monks, inquisitors and Mary worshippers, and then resumes with Luther. With a knowledge like that, the DVC does have you as a sitting duck. But be warned: if you learn the history you need to mark Newman's warning:

History is not a creed or a catechism, it gives lessons rather than rules; still no one can mistake its general teaching in this matter, whether he accept it or stumble at it. Bold outlines and broad masses of colour rise out of the records of the past. They may be dim, they may be incomplete; but they are definite. And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.

And Protestantism has ever felt it so. I do not mean that every writer on the Protestant side has felt it; for it was the fashion at first, at least as a rhetorical argument against Rome, to appeal to past ages, or to some of them; but Protestantism, as a whole, feels it, and has felt it. This is shown in the determination already referred to of dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and of forming a Christianity from the Bible alone: men never would have put it aside, unless they had despaired of it. It is shown by the long neglect of ecclesiastical history in England, which prevails even in the English Church. {8} Our popular religion scarcely recognizes the fact of the twelve long ages which lie between the Councils of Nicæa and Trent, except as affording one or two passages to illustrate its wild interpretations of certain prophesies of St. Paul and St. John. It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon. To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

6.

And this utter incongruity between Protestantism and historical Christianity is a plain fact, whether the latter be regarded in its earlier or in its later centuries. Protestants can as little bear its Ante-nicene as its Post-tridentine period. I have elsewhere observed on this circumstance: "So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing: so that 'when they rose in the morning' her true seed 'were all dead corpses'—Nay dead and buried—and without grave-stone. 'The waters went over them; there was not one of them left; they sunk like lead in the mighty waters.' Strange antitype, indeed, to the early fortunes of Israel!—then the enemy was drowned, and 'Israel saw them dead upon the sea-shore.' But now, it would seem, water proceeded as a flood 'out of the serpent's mouth, and covered all the witnesses, so that not even their dead bodies lay in the streets of the great city.' Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of formality, of superstition; his notion of faith, or of spirituality in religious worship; his denial {9} of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial commission, or of the visible Church; or his doctrine of the divine efficacy of the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of religious teaching; and let him consider how far Antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him in it. No; he must allow that the alleged deluge has done its work; yes, and has in turn disappeared itself; it has been swallowed up by the earth, mercilessly as itself was merciless." [Note 1]

That Protestantism, then, is not the Christianity of history, it is easy to determine, but to retort is a poor reply in controversy to a question of fact, and whatever be the violence or the exaggeration of writers like Chillingworth, if they have raised a real difficulty, it may claim a real answer, and we must determine whether on the one hand Christianity is still to represent to us a definite teaching from above, or whether on the other its utterances have been from time to time so strangely at variance, that we are necessarily thrown back on our own judgment individually to determine, what the revelation of God is, or rather if in fact there is, or has been, any revelation at all.

That, it seems to me is what it's coming down to for Evangelicals. Years ago, a friend (a fellow convert) remarked to me that he reached the stage where he realized he could be Protestant or Christian, but not both. What he meant was that he'd finally come to realize that he knew enough history (it was his major) to know that private judgement was not the invention of the 16th century. It had existed since the start of the Church and there had always been "variant Christianities". But there had also always been a mechanism in place (put there by Christ) to assure unity of faith and doctrine in the body of Christ: the Magisterium and the episcopal office. Knowing history, he knew perfectly well that the bishop were not always saints. But he also knew that the Church was the only Christian body that that had preserved a coherent witness. The problem with the Gnostics was that they were *too* diverse. The flatly contradicted not only the Church but each other (a problem not unknown in Protestantism). The new gnostics with their new Inside Knowledge (based on *nothing* but the word of a hack writer from New Hampshire will soon discover similar problems with their newly minted religion.

But that won't help Evangelicalism, because a problem has now been raised that mirrors my friends. Evangelicalism can choose to either remain Christian by becoming "deep in history" (and open itself thereby to the solid fact of the Catholic Church) or else it can choose to remain Protestant by clinging to private judgment (in the form of its bastard child, relativist postmodernist deconstructionism) and babble garbage like "What is truth? Let us be open to diversity! 42 million DVC readers can't be wrong!"

Because Newman's simply right: Ultimately the question comes down to "whether on the one hand Christianity is still to represent to us a definite teaching from above, or whether on the other its utterances have been from time to time so strangely at variance, that we are necessarily thrown back on our own judgment individually to determine, what the revelation of God is, or rather if in fact there is, or has been, any revelation at all."

The Catholic faith retains--and always will retain--the confidence that a real revelation has been given and that the fullness of that revelation subsists in the Catholic communion through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Down below...

an Evangelical comboxer remarks that the Church is just coasting along on momentum. Reader Zach responds:

That's some momentum. The number of adult converts to
Catholicism in America today is about to pass (if it hasn't already) the number
of Episcopalians in the pews.

Which puts me in mind of this entry on Rod Bennett's blog.

So you can see the Church is really dying on the vine.

Cool!

When I flew to NZ in 1997 I watched Hale-Bopp slow sink below the northern horizon as we headed south. Comets are supposed to be harbingers of doom. But I just think they're beautiful!

Elaine Pagels: Academic Fraud

Fr. Vince Kolo writes:

Like most priests I watched the first three episodes of God and the Girl with a degree of skepticism. After some reflection I wonder if there is something there that is deeper than the producers, cameramen and the four men intended. Three themes bubbled to the surface and I have to wonder if they were planned or is God just working in his mysterious ways. Pilgrimage, missionary and the cross jumped out at me from the three men who by the third episode were still pondering their decisions. There is a message is the young man who chose the girl but we will get back to him later.

The themes, models or images of the pilgrim, missionary and cross are nothing new to the Catholic Priesthood but are three things that are much needed in it today, especially in our country. Any young man discerning priesthood and any young priest today will have to carry the cross of a scandalized priesthood and church. The notion that carrying a real wooden cross some twenty miles may to discern a vocation may seem ridiculous or even masochistic to some. It may also be a powerful message to a church that needs to embrace the cross. American culture and the Catholic Church in the U.S. have not collectively embraced the cross of sacrifice or self denial for sometime. If God is merciful he will bring crosses to us because he knows it is what we need for our souls.

The young man who jets off the Guatemala gives us a glimpse to the missionary life. There was a time in the U.S. when priests were looked upon with the same affection and awe as Fr. Jorge. Those days are gone but if we do not recapture the missionary mind set the church will soon be gone as well. John Paul II call for a New Evangelization needs to be amplified to a scream. I think there was another hidden message in the young man's trip. The poverty of the Guatemalans was only material and monetary. Our poverty is in the U.S. is spiritual. We all do not need to jet off to a foreign land to find mission work. It is right under our noses.

Perhaps the most absurd yet most poignant way of discernment was the young man walking to Niagara Falls. I have to admit I do not think I would advise this method to anybody but it does have a Franciscan quality about it all. Setting out with a backpack and relying upon nothing but the good graces of strangers even echoes back to Christ sending out the disciples for the first time in Luke chapter nine. We need to recapture the sense of a pilgrim church in our country. The journey to Niagara Falls and the Carmelite Spirituality Center holds perhaps two messages for us. Recently a report in USA Today told of "Baptism trickling away" in our country. We definitely need a Niagara Falls of baptismal graces in our country. Perhaps the missed message of the Niagara pilgrimage was the Canadian Shrine of the Little Flower that was on the grounds. The spirituality of St Therese of Lisieux is the powerful yet simple medicine we all need.

Last but not least we come back to the man who chose the girl. We need fatherly priests in this country but we also need priestly fathers. This does not mean we ordained married men. It means we rekindle the priesthood of the faithful in married men. Strong faithful marriages will give the church strong faithful priests and religious vocations.

I may be reading too much into the shows but I don't think the produces could have cut and pasted all of these themes together. Who knows maybe God is working in primetime?

What a relief!

Because my blog audience is mainly Righties I feel it my duty to challenge a lot of Righties slogans and presuppositions with the teaching of the Faith. Hence, the time I have spent on, for instance, torture and certain sacred cows such as the Iraq War.

Because of this, some of my readers have periodically expressed the suspicion that I'm a closet Lefty. This, unfortunately, is what happens when people have only one lens for viewing the world: a political one. The fact is, though, that I don't evaluate things on the basis of party affiliation. Yes, I broadly speak of the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. But I don't believe that such half-comic labels are really adequate for analyzing a particular person's moral positions. And (more to the point) I am perfectly aware that ideological blindness is not a problem facing only the Right.

Case in point: Reader Tony, whose blinding hatred of the GOP leads him to quote some Jesuit about how it's fine to kill people by dehydration and then make the following ridiculous statement:

But all I am doing is putting forth these teachings as they were taught to me, and as were considered standard until the Republican barbarians tried to hijack our Catholic heritage.

Here's well-known Republican Barbarian John Paul II on what the Catholic Tradition says about murdering people by thirst. Oh, but he is being quoted by a Ritually Impure Right-Wing Commenter, so you can safely ignore him.

And here's the Catechism of the Catholic Church departing from the Immemorial Teaching of Some Jesuit:

Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted.

For those of you in Rio Linda, "ordinary care" means, among other things, food and water. This means that when you go out to lunch, you cannot claim it on your tax forms as "medical treatment". It also means that when you withhold water, you are not "withholding extraordinary care". You are murdering them by thirst.

Lefties on my blog can scream about "Republican barbarians" till the cows come home. It will not change the fact that you are, at the end of the day, allowing your enslavement to the Defense of Your Team to blind you to the fact that you are defending cold-blooded judicial murder.

And you thought the Right was the only team that could shut out the teaching the Church when it was inconvenient?

PA Evil Party Looks for Common Ground between Christ and Moloch

Not Your Father's Baptist Church

The widely circulated abbreviated version of Henry’s paper stated: “The time for remedy is now, for free-church Protestants stand at grave risk of bondage to the spirit of the modern age. Christians of the sort described herein, and Baptists such as I am, seem to face a limited range of options. Amidst the changing cultural conditions precipitated by modernity and now postmodernity, we may: (a) allow our practice of faith -- untethered to a rich tradition and without the resources of a functional magisterium -- to die the death of continued accommodation to culture; (b) convert to Roman Catholicism; or (c) begin a journey toward Rome that, without giving rise to full communion, nonetheless involves a critical engagement with Roman Catholicism as a touchstone of vital tradition and teaching authority about Christian faith and practice.”

Evangelicalism as it presently exists cannot continue. Evangelicals ultimately will have to either grab onto private judgement with both hands (and thereby wind up embracing postmodernist deconstruction that babbles "What is truth?" and "It's all about power" or else it will have to become Catholic or Orthodox and thereby retain a faith in something beyond My Personal Truth of the Moment. I'm relieved to see that some Evangelical academics are coming to recognize this fact. I hope Catholics wake up and recognize that this moment is coming.

Reader Nancy Montgomery writes from Houston:

I recently had this letter in the Houston Chronicle:

Although I tried to keep it brief, they edited some key things out of my letter, including the fact that Gnostics believed in two gods and that all matter is evil. (They also edited it in ways that went against their own style policy, which mystified me.) But anyway....

Today's Chronicle holds this response:

(Scroll down to "Gnostics were Early Christians")

Could you possibly post that link on your blog and encourage your Houston-area readers to respond to it by sending a letter to the editor at viewpoints@chron.com? It would be nice to see a reply pointing out the basic ways that the Gnostics were blatantly non-Christian since they deleted the "two gods / matter is evil" part of my letter. I was also amazed at the crap about Gnostics treating women and men as near equals! Sure! If women are willing to 'make themselves male' so they could be equal!

Thanks for considering this!

Your wish is my command. By the way, I will be speaking at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Houston (Sugar Land, to be precise) on May 5-6. Subject: The Da Vinci Deception and Catholic Truth Hope to see you there!

I will also (Pant! Pant!) speak on the Da Vinci Code May 7 at St. Mary of Sorrows, Fairfax, VA and May 8 at an Undisclosed Location in Southern Maryland. As soon as I know, you'll know.

Arguing with Cdl. Martini

A reader writes:

I think it’s important people understand why the Church teaches that it is immoral for spouses to have condomized sex (and why they should instead abstain when there is a high probability of transmitting a life-threatening disease like HIV/AIDS). That said, Ted Furton of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly has allowed me to post some scholarly articles on the subject that I think go far in showing people why the Church’s teaching is reasonable and truly “humane”:

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly has generously made available to us some recent articles on the questions that Cardinal Martini has raised about condom usage by couples when one spouse is infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.

The three pieces below were originally published in NCBQ (PDF files).

Letter from William May of the John Paul II Institute

Debate between Martin Rhonheimer and Benedict Guevin

In-depth analysis of the question by Luke Gormally

More from the source.

Rod Dreher Points Out the Connection Between "Conservative" and "Conservation"

Once, long ago, this connection was a no-brainer for people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Now it is reflexively laughed to scorn as Environmentalist Whackoism by many on the Right. It's what comes of replacing deliberation with sloganeering.

Are there nuts who worship Gaia? Yes. Are there statists who find the environmental movement a convenient platform for imposing their will on everybody else? Yes. Does this mean that nature is just a bunch of raw materials we can and should turn over to the Sinless Capitalist System for whatever use a few oligarchs see fit? No.

Nature is God's creation. We are it's stewards, not its owners. It is not ours to do with as we will, damn the consequences.

JanJan is a Menschette

Doncha love it when tyrants declare a democracy to be a "fake regime"

I wonder how long the current regime in Iran would last if the Iranians really had their druthers.

CIA: Those secret prisons don't exist and we're firing the person who revealed that they do

Besides, what does it matter that the evidence is solid? This person was a *Clinton* appointee. You may now Pavlovianly respond to that utterly irrelevant stimulus. Remember, it's not the content of the message, it's the Ritually Impure messenger that matters.

Move along, the CIA is investigating itself. If there are any problems, you'll be fully briefed.

Well if they claim it then it must be true

What you Get When you Substitute American Feel-Good-About-Yourselfism for Christian Charity

I am what you call a "person of size" or what former ages knew as a "fat guy". In former ages, to be fat was to be a target of jokes and insults because former ages knew that there was something outside the norm about being fat. Fatness indicates that you eat too much, as a general rule. And fat people like me knew that, well, if you eat too much then you should probably get used to the idea that people would notice you were fat.

Then came the age of Therapy and the mantra that everyone should be affirmed in their okayness and "accepted unconditionally". That mantra, like all heresies, is partly right because it's based on part of a Christian truth: namely, that God loves all his creatures, not because they are lovable but because he is love. There is no sinner in the world that God does not love and does not desire to have with him in glory. In the Christian tradition, this plays out in the fact that, despite our being creatures who are so revolting and repellent that we drove nails through the hands He stretched out to us, he nonetheless labors to change us into creatures who reproduce in their small creaturely way, the exact image and likeness of the Son of God in their bodies, souls, and spirits.

American Feel-Good-About-Yourselfism does not have this transcendent goal, however. Instead, it simply says "I'm good. If you don't like it, that's your loss." If you are, in fact, good then former ages would have called this "fortitude" when the good person was being pressured by a corrupt culture to do evil. But former ages would have called it "persistence in vice" if the person saying this was trying to persuade the world that his obesity was a virtue and something for which he and everyone around him should love him for.

Of course, it goes without saying that the glorious reward at the end of the American Feel-Good-About-Yourselfism Way is getting laid. We are delivered from the curse on Non-Affirmation in our Okayness, not by becoming good through the transformative power of the Spirit, but by Believing in Ourselves so much that others place their faith in us too and want to sleep with us.

And so abide these three, gluttony, lust and pride. But the greatest of these is Pride.

Read the predictions here years ago...

Watch the Journalistic Flagship of Glorious American Capitalism labor to bring them to pass today.

Utterly, utterly despicable.

Martian Death Flu

Peter and I both came down with a really awful stomach flu about 2 AM Sunday. We've both been emitting large amounts of fluid from both ends in between sleeping for the past day and a half. I think we're on the mend, but I don't even want to *think* about food for at least a week. Gross!

Check out my friend Mike Aquilina's Fathers of the Church blog!

Mike knows whereof he speaks. He's written some fine books about the patristic Church including:

The Mass of the Early Christians

The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers

and

The Way of the Fathers: Praying with the Early Christians

as well as lots of other good stuff.

Plus, he's the guy that introduced me to that great poem about St. Jerome.

Stupid Party Country Clubber Washes his Hands of Terri Schiavo

"I am pro-life and I respect life," Crist, a Republican candidate for governor, said at a gathering of the nonpartisan Forum Club of the Palm Beaches.

"There are some decisions that ought to be left to God and family," Crist said. "Had I have been governor, I would have not done the same thing" as Bush.

Translation: I have no king but Judge Greer and the MSM.

And you thought the Left were the only people capable of combining smarmy piety and blasphemy.

Interview with Dan DeMatte of "God or the Girl"

Unleash the Power of the Blog!

Here's a chance to do some good.

A reader writes:

Good day! I just wanted to let you know about a story that your blog reading audience might find interesting. Two weeks ago, myself and a few other locals here in Pawleys Island (South Carolina) launched a Christian social networking site called Oaktree.org . To date, the Christian community has received our site with open arms. We have added over 1,200 members in the first 15 days since launch. Unlike the "targeted" social networking sites where they build a carbon copy of MySpace or Facebook and add their moniker (sports, business, Christian, etc.), we tried to be unique in both features and design.

We have many of the same features as the typical social networking sites like profile images, personal blogs, private messaging, forums and chat, but that is where the similarity stops. To create the unique Christian feel, we built features like:

* Impact Projects (Where Christians put the "purpose driven" into action)

* Oaktree.org Hope Exchange (Interactive prayer board)

* 20 Questions (Where members can answer questions that pertain to themselves and their faith)

* Top 25 Prayer & Encouragement Volunteer List

* Oaktree.org Newsroom (RSS feeds to many top Christian news services & blogs)

We feel these features compliment well the other mainstream social networking sections to create a truly unique and innovative Christian experience online. Some of the Christian news media has even started to recognize our site: Christian Post & Breaking Christian News .

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at bstump@oaktree.org. Please also email me any feedback or ideas you may have on our site. Thanks and continue the great blog!

Here's a very hopeful sign

Joint Muslim-Christian protests in Egypt against the Foaming Bronze Age Fanatics.



It reads "Long live the Crescent with the Cross".

More like these folk please.

Jesus: Guaranteed to Create Controversy No Matter Where He is Mentioned

Evil. Just Evil.

Gone Hiking

Since May will be The Month Without Dad due to my running all over the world Da Vincifying, I'm going off to the woods with the kidlets today. See you Monday! Happy Continuing Octave of Easter!

Democracy is a fire in the minds of men. - George W. Bush, Second Inaugural

I am *so* relieved that the President of China was delivered from that awful intimidation by that brutal protester, who was, thank God, arrested and charged with "intimidating a foreign official". I just hope that Bush's words of consolation to the poor man will soothe his jangled nerves.

And please, don't disturb the Corporate Heads as they suck up to China with petty complaints about China's quirky habit of vivisecting members of Falun Gong.

Bad for business!

So who's the genius behind this?

Possibly the dumbest and most offensive idea I've heard this year.

Update: Cancelled. "It was not a good idea, it did not take into consideration the relations between Christianity and Judaism," Balawejder told The Associated Press."

Duh.

A reader writes:

Just saw your bit about going to the Holy Land. I know you're not a beer conoiseur, but there's a pub in Dublin that has been in continuous operation for 1,000 years. One of my cousins there took me to it when I visited shortly after returning from Desert Storm. If you get a chance, have someone preferably older than about 60 in a nearby village give you directions. It doesn't matter where you ask them to go. Simply listening to that certain Irish way of giving directions is worth the experience. I'll tell you about my experience with this when going to another cousin's wedding in the West of Ireland. Oh yes, then there's the way that I've seen at least one of them make a call:

Man At Payphone (called party at the other end picks up the phone): "Is this you?" the payphone man asks.

(He was expecting someone else, maybe?)

As you drive into Dublin from the airport, hopefully you'll go by their version of the Projects where the gypsies/tinkers/"travellers" live. I saw a number of shaggy-looking nag-horses grazing on the grass out front of these ill-kept tenament high-rises. "What's the story with them?" I asked my uncle as we drove by the horses. "Why, those are the horses the Tinkers use for their horse races." "Where do they race them?" says I. "On the front lawn there," he replies referring to the lawn outside the projects.

Make sure, if you're a lamb fan, that you have some roast lamb with mint sauce (NOT mint jelly) while there. Very good stuff. Dublin Castle is a pretty cool tour as well. Among other things there, you'll see a large painting of one of the Crown's Viceroys, Earl Grey, hanging on one of the walls. I didn't know anything about him, but I figured that he was pretty famous/ruthless to get a tea blend named after him.

Anyway, I know you'll have a great time there.

I loathe beer, but it would be criminal not to check out that pub. Also, I am informed that Sherry Weddell, quite by coincidence, will be arriving in London the day before I arrive in Dublin. So she is now scheming on how to catch a hop from London to Dublin so we can fetch up and do a bit of sightseeing together. This is to atone for the fact that the last time I did intercontinental travel I would up in Sydney and Adelaide, Australia at exactly the same time she was in Melbourne, yet we never connected.

No, I am not a stalker.

Top 10 Reasons Why Evangelical Converts Rock

I particularly appreciate 10, 7, 6, and 2.

Fr. Bryce Sibley writes:

Happy Easter Everyone!

I'm writing to let you know that a small booklet of Eucharistic Reflections
that I wrote for the year of the Eucharist has been published by New Hope
Publishing out of Kentucky.

It is entitled "Fount of Love: Eucharistic Reflections by Fr. Bryce Sibley."
They are not available on-line as of yet, but if you call 1 800 764-8444 you
can order them. It is item number 3099.

Imagine, if you order some not only will you be spreading the gospel, but
you will be helping with my retirement fund.

God bless!

I want Fr. Sibley to put together a "Peace and Justice Goes to the Movies" film guide. He used to offer "Peace and Justice Film Nights" at the North American College in Rome. Seminarians would troop in, expecting a biography of Dorothy Day, or an art house film about reproductive rights for Sandinista lesbians. The lights would go down, and then the Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood double feature would begin.

Who could not love a priest like that?

Voskogoths Sack Another Church

The Sacred Space Designer that Taste Forgot Strikes Again.

Nifty Event on the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Charlotte, NC area

Extry! Extry! Get all your "God or the Girl" news here!

First, the press release:

We hope by now you've seen at least one episode of the A&E series, God or the Girl. If you haven't, perhaps you've heard the positive buzz or read the rave reviews. The critical acclaim for this series from both within the Catholic Church and from the mainstream press is nothing short of phenomenal. Listen to this review from National Public Radio (NPR).

Accolades aside, this series still needs your "vote." In order to be "heard," you must tune in and watch the remaining shows. An honest, engaging and uniquely faithful look at the discernment process for the Catholic priesthood awaits you this Friday and Sunday nights (April 21 and 23) on A&E. Please take the time to register your support for positive programming -- and be sure to tell your friends!

See the full list of endorsements here.


Opportunities to Watch!

Sunday, April 23, 1pm - 5pm ET (Episodes 1-4)

Sunday, April 23, 10pm ET (FINALE)

Monday, April 24, 2am ET (FINALE)

What Can You Do!

1. Make this show Number One on A&E. WATCH IT!! If we don't watch this show while its on the network, the network won't know how we feel about positive programming.

2. Forward this or send an e-mail or two to friends and family bringing God or the Girl to their attention.

3. Log on to the A&E website discussion board and share your thoughts about the show and A&E's decision to carry this series. A&E NEEDS TO HEAR FROM YOU, OTHERWISE SERIES LIKE THESE ARE DEAD IN THE WATER!

4. Contact your priest or youth director and encourage them to use this series to teach about vocations. Visit the website GodortheGirl.com and download support materials to help start vocational study groups in your parishes.

5. Touch base with your Diocesan Vocation Director and make sure he or she knows about the series and the study materials that have been prepared for their use, free-of-charge, at the GodortheGirl.com website.

Then, the Interview with the Priest from the Show!

Pretty impressive for somebody with no TV access to the outside world, eh?

A reader writes:

According to Judaism, Jews are obligated to follow the 10 Mosaic Commandments, while non-Jews are obliged to follow the 7 Noahide (of Noahic) Commandments. Most of my fellow Christians do not consider themselves Jews, so the 10 Commandments would not be applicable to them, but I think most have never heard of the Noahic laws. For those that consider themselves Jews, isn't ignoring the other 603 mizvot cherry-picking? As all 613 mizvot are "the Law", what is the justification for ignoring all but 10?

I'm afraid some of this is unclear, and much of it requires an expertise I lack. For instance, I am not a Jew, so I'm not the guy to ask about details of what "Judaism" (which kind?) teaches. I know that Judaism does not usually consider Gentile bound by the covenant with Moses for the simple reason that the covenant was made with Israel, not the nations. But I don't see how that would affect how Christians view their relationship with the 10 Commandments. For, of course, orthodox Christianity *does* consider the 10 Commandments to be binding. We do not consider them salvific (only Christ can save). But that simply means we believe we are called to transcend the commandments by grace (i.e., "Don't just 'not kill, steal, and commit adultery and blasphemy'. Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love neighbor as self and so fulfill and surpass the Law.").

For Jews (as a general rule), the last covenant God made with all humans was the covenant with Noah. Therefore, for Jews (as a general rule), the terms of that covenant are binding on all humans. The terms are pretty simple and constitute most of what Catholic theologians would call "natural law":

Do not murder.
Do not steal.
Do not worship false gods.
Do not be sexually immoral.
Do not eat a limb removed from a live animal.
Do not curse God.
Set up courts and bring offenders to justice.

As you can see, much of this is also part of the 10 Commandments.

I have no idea who you are referring to when you speak of "cherry-picking". Liberal Jews who are basically just secularists? If so, I (and the orthodox Jews I know) would agree that many Jews are unfaithful to the covenant. Twas ever thus. But then, we Catholics have our own house to set in order before we need to concern ourseslves with how well somebody else is tending to their relationship with God.

A reader writes:

I started in September, small town parish. Very well meaning, sincere Catholics on the RCIA team. I've had 30+ years in Episcopal Church after becoming a Christian (as I thought at the time) through Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri ministry. Many of the people on the RCIA team came to know Christ much more recently.

Last spring, I had a kind of epiphany: I looked at the possible futures of the Anglican communion and saw only splintering and fragmentation, and thought, "this can NOT be what the Church is" in the meaning of its life.

RCIA has been challenging in good and bad ways. The "catecheis" clearly involves and should involve the catechesis of faithful lives lived out before God, with consistent and persistent acts of charity, and seeing these people, I am ashamed of my sloth, my spiritual and intellectual pride, my self-centeredness. So part of what I'm struggling with is a deepending sense of unworthiness to be received (and yes I know about the sacrament of reconciliation, which I've done several times since a Cursuillo in January).

At the same time, in about two weeks, I'm supposed to stand up and swear an oath that I accept the teachings of the Catholic Church. At least, I think that's what's happening: I just found two weeks ago that I'll be receiving the sacrament of confirmation (I was baptized in the Episcopal church as an infant): I still haven't gotten an explanation of what that is or mean. I feel hugely inprepared to take that pledge; I've been reading the Catechemism, along with a rather simple book provided by the RCIA team, "Believing in Jesus", by Leonard Foley O.F.M....In all these weeks, there has been very little that gives me an understanding of the ROMAN CATHOLIC church -- what's distinctive about it....

This all sounds like whining and moaning. I'm alone in this: my wife and son, still Episcopalians, support me, but I've left the parish where I've worshipped with my wife for over 15 years.

I know that I don't, and can't, "know everything" before I accept the authority of the Church. And I think I know....enough. In a way....But it's so...frustrating. It seems so many catholics have NO IDEA of the depths and riches of their heritage. I'm starving for it and I can't seem to get it.

Feel free to ignore this. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for in writing this.

I think I know a little of how you are feeling. And I therefore think (based on what you've written), that you are pretty much on the right track and shouldn't worry too much. It is enough to know enough. Essentially, what you are being asked is not "Have you studied every detail of Catholic teaching and reached agreement with it?" Rather, you are being asked, "Are you persuaded that the Church is the divinely created means by which Christ and his truth are communicated to the world?" If you are, then it follows that the Church's teaching will be reliable.

Here's a little snippet from my introduction to my book on Mary:

As we shall see, by the time I entered the Church, I was persuaded there
were no anti-biblical Catholic teachings—not even the Marian teachings. But this doesn't mean that by the time I entered the Church, I completely understood all things Marian. Jesus' grace provided sufficient softening and seeding of the ground so that I didn't find Marian devotion and doctrine impossible to accept upon my entry into the Church. But though I had, by the time I became Catholic, come to the conviction that there was nothing anti-biblical here, I still didn't get Mary. I knew what Catholic teaching wasn't: it wasn't anti-biblical. But I didn't know what it was. Catholic Marian devotion didn't, as they say, "do anything for me" and in many cases, Marian devotion still gave me irrational willies well after I was Catholic. So, curiously, most of the actual "discovery" of Mary took place after I became Catholic, not before.

Some folks find this hard to understand. After all, when you enter the Catholic Church, you're required to say, "I believe all that the Holy Catholic Church teaches and proclaims is revealed by God." How could I say that if I didn't even understand most of the stuff about Mary and was still rather edgy about large portions of it?

That question reminds me of the joke about the Marxist who heard a proposal for a very sensible economic program that conflicted with his diagram of the universe. "Oh sure, it will work in reality," he replied, "but will it work in theory?" Theoretically (at least for some people) every Catholic convert has worked through every single conceivable permutation of Catholic theology before they become enter the Church and anything less than this is a half-baked conversion. In reality, however, experience from the New Testament onward has shown that people can know enough to become Catholic while still having lots of questions that have to be filled in later.

The disciples live this paradox when they struggle with some of Jesus' hard sayings, such as His disturbing remark that "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:53). Jesus, up till that point, had a fairly large entourage of disciples and hangers-on who—what with interesting preaching, free food, the occasional miracle, and the pleasure of watching Jesus stick His finger in the eye of Disliked Authority Figures—had carved out a comfy little groove for themselves in the company of the latest counterculture figure.

But now the guru was starting to sound weird. "Eat His flesh? Drink His blood? The guy's starting to lose it," most of them said. Result: Most of the disciples said, "We're outta here." And so John records, "After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him." (John 6:66). Jesus was creeping out His disciples.

However, Jesus wasn't in a hurry to regain the entourage. Instead, He challenged the disciples who remained, saying, "Do you also wish to go away?" (John 6:67). And Simon Peter's answer was not, "I refuse to follow you another step until you put a written explanation of this outrageous behavior on my desk. I'm not just some dumb sheep, you know! I am a Thinking Adult who deserves to have my concerns addressed and who does not much appreciate all this stuff about 'trusting' and 'mystery'."

Instead, Simon Peter answered Him as many a Catholic convert has replied when faced with one of the many mysteries of this Strange Divine Sea of a Faith:

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God." (John 6:68-69)

It is interesting that, so far as we can tell from the Gospels, Jesus didn't reply to Simon Peter's offering of faith with a cross-referenced treatise on the Eucharist. Instead, He chose to let the disciples muddle along after this and gave them no explanation of what this mysterious language was all about. And when He finally does return to the subject of the Eucharist, He more or less explains His mysterious words in John 6 with even more mysterious words at the Last Supper. For Jesus' extremely strange commands, "Take, eat; this is my body" and "Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (Matthew 26:26-28) are given without explanation to a gaggle of disciples who very likely no more understood this than they understood His extremely explicit prophecy that "he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised" (Matthew 16:21). In short, they believed, but they did not understand. Indeed, they believed in order to understand.

The first disciples of the Apostles appear to have done much the same. They knew enough to come to faith, but there was still a lot they didn't know. The Apostles were content to receive them in their infant faith, but they were not content to leave them infants. Thus, the author of Hebrews writes: "You need milk, not solid food; for every one who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But solid food is for the mature" (Hebrews 5:12-14). Note that he does not chide his readers for converting while they were still on a milk diet. Rather, he chides them for staying on a milk diet. He assumes, as a normal part of the Christian life, that converts will come to understand things after their conversion that they did not understand at the time they were baptized. He does not say, "If you didn't understand this before, you should have waited till you did before converting."

For this reason, Catholic teaching has historically been divided between catechesis and mystagogia. Catechesis is the introduction to the mysteries of the Faith in preparation for Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist at Easter. Through it, we learn the basic shape of the Church's faith (outlined in the Nicene Creed, which is said by Catholic worshipers during the Mass). Instruction is also given about the meaning and importance of the seven sacraments instituted by our Lord and the Church's moral teaching (summarized in the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes). Finally, catechumens are given an introduction to the "interior life" by studying the Our Father (also known as the "Lord's Prayer"). Not all Catholics get even this much instruction; St. Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch on the day they met (Acts 3:26-39). But the whole point of catechesis is to give someone enough information to intelligently assent to the saving lordship of Jesus Christ and know what he's promising to do when he enters the Catholic Church.

Catechesis is like a map. A good study of a map of my hometown, Seattle, will give you the general lay of the land so you won't be totally lost when you go there. But reading a map of Seattle isn't the same thing as living there and getting to know all the amazing things Seattle has to offer. The map won't tell you about that little cafe in Fremont and that great little playground in the U District and that pizza place in Belltown that makes the best cappuccino in the city. It's the same deal with catechesis. Entering the Church with a good basic working knowledge of her teaching is not the same as living in the Church and plumbing her depths to make the billion and one connections with the "riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints" (Ephesians 1:18) God wishes us to make. For that, the new Catholic may need a little help, and so instruction after entry into the Church is provided by mystagogia, a second course of instruction and reflection.

Two other things: when it comes to mystagogia, you will have to be proactive. Most parishes are lousy at it, and many new converts are not interested in it. That's because baptism is looked at as the end of something rather than the beginning. Happily, for the convert hungry for information, there's a Niagara of materials on the teaching of the Church. Just plowing through Steve Ray's list of reading "Resources" will keep you busy for years to come.

As to what's distinctive about the Catholic Church, I don't know what your particular beliefs are and so can't speak to what might appear as "distinctively" Catholic for you. One thought experiment a friend of mine proposes to his well-meaning Evangelical students when they are tempted to suppose that "we're all saying the same thing" is to cheerfully say, "Great! Then I'll see you after class! Let's go adore the Blessed Sacrament and ask the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Supreme Pontiff John Paul the Great for the Holy Souls in Purgatory." Voila! It turns out we aren't all saying the same thing. Something similar may obtain here: what is it about Catholic teaching that gives you the willies? That, for you, is probably what is "distinctively" Catholic (even though it may also be a feature of other traditions such as the Orthodox). At the bare minimum, the papacy is distinctively Catholic.

Please do write back if you want to talk further. Fear not! You are on the right track.

It's Official. I'll be in Ireland May 11-19

All I know so far is that I will be in Belfast and Dublin, speaking about DVC. Looks like there just won't be time for a hop across the Irish Sea to the Big Island.

Looking forward to seeing all the leprechauns and mad cattle!

Lovely Appreciation of Benedict by Amy Welborn

Great Enema About to Catch up with Mahony and Egan

Meanwhile, centrifugal forces threaten to tear apart lay and ordained offices.

Contrary to some confused and muddled Catholics, this second item is not a good thing, nor is it anything like a real reform. It is the curse after the Fall, not the redemption. If it happens, it will simply be the ecclesial equivalent of the Body of Christ trying to heal itself like a teenage neurotic attempt to purify herself by cutting herself repeatedly. Repentance and love, not ecclesial wagon-circling paired off against paranoid vigilanteism, are what is necessary.

Fresno Presbyterians are Educating Themselves about the DVC

Good thing too. I wish more Catholics would follow suit.

I think the most maddening thing about this book is the thought of somebody losing their faith over this--this!--stupid piece of dimestore erudition.

If you are going to risk your eternal soul, it should at least be over something noble and romantic and big. If you are bound to damn yourself, then at least let it be over a torrid and star-crossed love affair, or out of tragic hubris that sought know What Man Was Not Meant to Know, or over some insane and violent of country, or out of desire for titanic powers to manipulate nature or some Byronic despair over a cold world's rejection of a Great Artiste.

But to lose your soul over this cartoonish, illiterate, dishonest piece of hack drivel...

It reminds me of Screwtape's maxim: "To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return--that is what really gladdens Our Father's heart."

How Many Darwinists Does it Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

Much merriment ensues.

A reader writes:

I was listening to your radio interview but missed a section...It's hard to hear my computer while I'm scrubbing the bathroom floor. :-)

I popped back into the room just in time to hear you talking about how society finds whatever Jesus suits its current behavior. I really liked what you had to say - it was so true. Question: Will I see this covered in DV Deception when my order arrives? Or have you written an article about this topic that I can look up? I want to share this with my teens without relying on only my memory (we are in TDVC defusing mode around here).

Yes. We cover it in the book. Also, you can read about it here.

On the radio again from 11:00-12:00 with Bp. Weigand of Sacramento

You can stream it live here.

There's a World of Good out there!

In a time of vocational crisis for the Catholic Church...

one man issued a clarion call that inspired thousands to seek the priesthood.

With the help of Jared Hess, director of Napeoleon Dynamite, Jack Black gets in touch with his inner StrongBad--for the children.

Adopt a Nun. You know you want to.

Scarce this AM

...cuz of all those back to back radio interviews. However, here's my latest on CE.

More later, dudes and dudettes.

PS: You can stream the 8:00 AM Pacific interview now.

Looks Like I'll be Going to Ireland to Talk about DVC stuff!

Things are heating up! No details yet, but it looks like Ireland is going to happen for sure.

If any of you UK readers want me to come speak, now is the ideal time. You'll just have to pay the cost of transportation from Ireland to England/Scotland and back to Ireland. Carpe diem!

A reader writes:

As I continue to wrestle with the mutually exclusive worldviews of conservative/traditionalist Catholics and Pentecostalized Protestants I saw this in the New York Times.

40,000 people, some of them driving from all over the south, to attend the "biggest Easter service" in the country. (Of course, I suspect that larger numbers thronged St. Peter's but since huge numbers are common there - they aren't noted in the article.)

Clearly, what these people are seeking in worship is vastly different from what a throng of Traditionalist Catholics are seeking. And yet both, (and Orthodox converts as well ) sometimes describe their ideal worship as "what heaven must be like". When Traditionalists do so, it supposed to be the conversation stopper. How dare one ask for more or less or other than heaven?

But these Pentecostals also regard their kind of service as "heaven" - as noted in this article. Although I think their idea of heaven would be a Traditionalist's idea of hell and vice versa.

Why do I keep wrestling? Because the two largest and most vibrant kinds of Christianity in the world, the only two kinds of Christianity that are growing, that are evangelizing, are continuing to move steadily toward opposite ends of the spirituality universe.

As the Catholic elite (lay and clergy) becomes more permeated with Traditionalist ideas: more formally liturgical, more introverted, more likely to associate silence and Latin and excluding the venacular with "normative Catholicism", more commonly filled with a deep loathing of the personal ever intruding into the liturgical perfection that they think of as "heaven", Protestants around the world and in this country are rapidly becoming more ahistorical, more expressive, more personal and emotional, more extroverted, more Pentacostal in worship and belief, dancing barefoot and singing loudly in the aisles as a form of praise.

This divide is going to make the Protestant Reformation look like a mere squabble. At least Luther could met and argue with Catholic theologians of his day in a more or less common language. They had the same basic formation and life experience. But Traditionalist Catholics and Independent/Apostolic post-denominationalists are so far apart that they can't even recognize each other's existence.

I sometimes suspect that Catholics fight with Catholics because it's just easier than actually engaging a culture that hates you and wants to destroy you

Case in point,Steve Kellmeyer's time-wasting attack on Carl Olsen and Sandra Miesel's Da Vinci Hoax.

Frankly, Steve loses me the moment he condescendingly refers to this fine book as "a moderately competent debunk". But from there, he goes on to pettifog about how Brown's book (which does nothing else besides promise to give you the Secret Salvific Gnosis Which Will Liberate You From the Evil God of the Jews and Christians) bears no resemblance whatever to gnosticism.

Uh Huh.

It's a stupid, stupid attack on a fine book and two fine writers who are on the side of the angels in this particular battle. I don't know why Steve feels it so important to bash them and Ignatius instead of turning his energies to something fruitful. But it often seems to be the case that some Catholics would rather diddle around with foolish quarrels with people who are on their side rather than go up against real enemies of the faith.

Meanwhile, Olsen undertakes the tedious task of defending himself from this dumb, distracting, time-wasting attack.

"Moral Equivalence"

Yesterday I noted that Hamas blew up innocent Israelis and called it self defence while Israel treated Palestinian Christians like crap and called it self defence.

Like clockwork, some readers predictably called this "moral equivalence". If you are like me, you may be wondering how they pulled off this feat of moral reasoning. After all, I didn't say "Treating Palestinian Christians like crap is the same thing as cold-blooded murder". Indeed, I mistakenly credited all of my readers with the ability to see that this is self-evidently not so.

But the fact that murder and treating people like crap is self-evidently not morally equivalent does not render the act of treating people like crap a virtue. And so I noted that both sides were pretending that their respective sins were somehow justifiable. I did not say their sins were identical. But even this was too much for the "Israel is Immaculately Conceived and Preserved from All Sin Both Original and Actual" contingent to bear. And so the bogus charge of moral equivalence to deflect people from the thought that, incredibly, even Israel is capable of sin.

The mythos on most of the Right in this country is that, at the end of the day, Israel never has and never will *really* committed a sin against the Palestinian Christians. Oh sure, they've had to break a few eggs to make an omelette. But who can really blame them? You've got Hamas blowing people up for crying out loud. So if Israel winds up screwing over the Palestinian Christians and grabbing their water well too bad! When I was a lad we went without water and we liked it! And if the Palestinian Christians have this inexplicable notion that the Israelis are, in fact, unjust to them for this and other sins, that just goes to show how much in league they are with Palestinian Muslims. It couldn't possibly be evidence that Israel is, in fact, unjust to the Palestinian Christian community, because no such evidence can exist since everything Israel does is, in fact, justified. And if you deny that, you are as good as calling Israelis the moral equivalent of Hamas' murderers.

Sheesh!

Update: Disputations ponders the phenomenon as well.

John Farrell Sends This Link and Notes...

I have only a couple of comments. I. Notice that when ambulance chasers
get their cases thrown out, they start whimpering about "technicalities." 2. Notice that the woman who smeared Father Murphy doesn't have to give her name or make an appearance. She can run back to the shadows.

As I've said before, the Archdiocese did not do itself much credit when this whole charade started in August of 2004. Father Murphy, whom I've known my whole life, and who taught me how to serve as an altar boy almost 40 years ago, was basically thrown to the wolves and has had to fend for himself, including relying on the charity of the many friends and families who stuck by him and helped him get an attorney. I can't help wondering whether Cardinal O'Malley will be sending him an apology.

Anyway, we're all thrilled here. Of course, don't expect the Boston Globe to run a related piece any time soon. They're content to just write about the accusations--not the actual verdict.

In case folks hadn't noticed it, most of what is happening with respect to the Catholic Church in the public square is no longer about justice. It's about the persecution and destruction of the Church with absolutely no regard for the common good. The Church shall, of course, survive. However, the poor and vulnerable served by the Church shall be deeply hurt. And it is an open question whether our culture, in attempting to destroy the Church, will survive the attempt. Personally, I'm skeptical it shall.

Good News on the Da Vinci Deception Front

Just passed 110K copies sold. Plus, we've sold 15,000 of the Spanish edition so far. And the movie hasn't come out yet.

Still a drop in the bucket compared to 42 million of DVC, but it's still a hopeful sign that not everybody is a complete sucker.

CNN takes a look at the Order of Albino Assassins

Stuff I'm up to soon

On the radio today (twice, since I'll also be on "Putting it on the Line" from 5:00-6:00 PM Eastern)!

Speaking on the Da Vinci Code in Seattle tomorrow afternoon.

April 19 Interview on KBVM, Portland OR. 8:00-9:00 AM Pacific Time.

April 19 Interview on KVSS, Omaha NE. 9:30-10:00 AM Pacific Time.

April 19 Interview on "The Bishop's Hour" on Immaculate Heart Radio 2:00-3:00 EST (11a-12p PST).

April 28-30 Catholic Scripture Study Conference in Charlotte, NC. Topic: Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did.

May 5-6 7:00 PM. Houston, TX. Topics: The Da Vinci Deception, 101 Reasons Not to Be Catholic, and Mary: The True Sacred Feminine.

May 7 7:00 PM. St. Mary of Sorrows, Fairfax, VA. Topic: The Da Vinci Deception.

May 8? Possible gig in southern Maryland.

May 10 7:00 PM. Catholic Newman Center, University of Washington, 4502 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA. Topic: Behold Your Mother. Contact Fr. Tom Kraft. Phone: 206 527-5072

A reader asks:

What is John Dominic Crossan's official stsatus viv-a-vis the Church? I was participating in a discussion with some evang/fundie friends, who cited Crossan's asssertions about the "metaphorical" resurrection of Christ (as opposed to the actual resurrection), along with some of Crossan's other theological position's. Of course, they did not fail to mention that he was a "Roman Catholic priest,'" thereby implying that his views were one of the "accepted" Catholic teachings on the subject. Some of this was delivered with a good-natured wink of the eye, and I managed to persuade them that Crosson was dissedent, at least. But I do not know if he's been disciplined or excommunicated for his heretical teachings. Do you know?

I have a notion he's an ex-priest. I doubt he's excommunicate. I know he still is collecting a paycheck from DePaul, yet another bastion of Catholic academe. If anybody knows more, please fill my reader (and me) in. As far as I'm concerned, Crossan's an apostate, but I'm not a bishop and so my opinion doesn't keep him from the sacraments. It just keeps me from taking seriously a man who says Jesus was eaten by wild dogs.

Everything you could ever want to know about Pope Benedict XVI, courtesy of Christopher Blosser

Hamas Blows up Innocent Israelis, Calls it Self-Defense

Israel Treats Palestinian Christians Like Crap, Calls it Self-Defense

Everybody agrees that it's not their fault.

God accepts responsibility, is crucified.

Free Speech Wins a Round in Soviet Canuckistan

Human Life Loses a Round in the Judicial Imperium of Florida

A reader asks:

How would you answer the typical argument from Bible Christians that all you have to do is believe in Jesus and you shall be saved. The usual quotation is from Romans, if you believe and confess that Jesus is Lord, than you shall be saved.

You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. (James 2:24)

If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. (1 Cor 13:2)

Or, to put it in a nutshell, here is how Paul sees his mission:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3 the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations. (Romans 1:1-5)
Paul does not preach a gospel of salvation by "faith alone". He teaches (like the Catholic Church) that we are saved by God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit via the sacraments by faith which expresses itself in concrete acts of love. For Paul, as for Jesus, the opposite of "belief" is not "disbelief". The opposite of "belief" is "disobedience".

That's because the faith is incarnational. It is always understood as enfleshed in action. Asking whether faith or works saves is like asking which blade on the scissors does the cutting. To be sure, we can't earn our salvation and put God in our debt. Grace is always prior. That's why the Council of Trent declares, "If anyone says that man can be justified before God by his own works, whether done by his own natural powers or through the teaching of the law, without divine grace through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema." But by grace, we are enabled respond to God and open ourselves to more grace by our obedience. That's why Paul says, "he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life." (Galatians 6:8).

This is what the Church means by "merit".

Easter Miracles Still Happen

Readers Attempt to Correct Ignorant Press Blather About Gospel of Judas

The breathtaking stupidity about the Gospel of Judas in the MSM is astounding. The spectacle of ignorami latching on to the gnostics as a) proto-feminists and b) philo-semites is utterly hilarious to anybody who knows anything about the gnostic phenomenon. It's like seeing somebody grab on to the figure of John Wayne and start touting him as a sensitive New Age Guy on the basis of three words you once heard him speak.

Memo to the Press: Gnostics were often quite hostile to women because women were the means by which spirit was imprisoned in matter. For the same reason, they were deeply hostile to Jews and the God of the Jews because he was the big evil god who created the material world that, in their scheme, Jesus came to liberate us from. Marcion deleted the entire Jewish bible and all quotations from it from his Sanitized-For-Your-Protection canon of Scripture. It was the evil anti-semitic Catholic Church that made sure the Jewish Bible survived in the Western world, precisely because it recognized that the Father of our Lord Jesus was the God of Israel.

Sheesh!

Scenes from Unassimilated Deutsche Turkistan

Stephen "Feddie" Dillard of Southern Appeal Addresses the Federalist Society of Mississippi College

Discusses the evolution of the Supreme Court from the "least dangerous branch" into a judicial oligarchy, defends originalism, and briefly addresses the current problems with the judicial nomination process. He also answers some questions at the end from students.

A Citizen of Judah Arraigns the Northern Kingdom of Israel for Their Apostasy and Idolatry

All quite true. The Left is indeed the party of apostasy, contempt for Christian orthodoxy, hatred of the Church, and loathing of ordinary Christian sexual morality.

Problem is, much of the marriage between the political Right and Christians is one of convenience for the Right too. And the moment Christians get on the wrong side of the Right, I have a feeling we shall find ourselves to be as popular as Jeremiah was with House of David. Witness the ruthlessness with which the War Party shouted down that damned Euroweenie Pope, JPII when he got in the way of their designs.

But--for the moment--the columnist is basically right. The Left's contempt for Christians is barely even concealed anymore. That doesn't mean every last Lefty is an apostate. There are still believers who align more with the Left than the Right in the (to my mind quixotic) hope that the Left will abandon its mindless atttachment to lust and the consequent adoration of abortion and homosexual enthusiasms. But it does mean that these people are tolerated by the Powers in the Party only as harmless buffoon who shall never be granted the power to affect the course of the Party--much as social conservatives are allowed the illusion of mattering to the Powers of the Right, until they conflict with the Forces of Mammon. At which point, they are firmly shown their seat at the back of the bus.

Why the NY Times Ran That Piece Last Week Glumly Warning Pro-Lifers that Outlawing Abortion is a Losing Proposition

Because, you know, they so much want the best for pro-lifers.

Oh, and in a similar vein, the NY Times runs a piece detailing the plight of Thinking Americans[TM] and other Blue State types who find themselves trapped in South Dakota like subjects of the British Crown trapped in France when the Nazis overran it. The poor dears. All that sophistication gone to waste on a bunch of fetus-loving hayseeds who probably have never even seen a rerun of "Sex and the City".

Better Late than Never...

Rerum Novarum offers prayer for various needs for the Triduum.

A Blogger Needs Your Help Publicizing Good Deeds

Pro-Choice Brownshirts on the March!

Astoundingly, the college looks like it's actually going to do something about it.

Fascinating piece on how the self-serving grandiosity of embedded reporters makes it so hard to get a real sense of what's happening in Iraq

Only time will tell if this happy headline is true

I hope it is.

Some Generals Get Out of the Bush HotHouse and Begin to Say They Have Problems with the War

People still inside the Bush Hot House say, "That's crazy! There's complete openness to criticism of policy in the Hot House. These people are finks. And you can trust me because my job depends on saying that!"

I suspect that this particular argument is going to be a tough sell for the Administration.

When Lefties Do Theology

Gore: God is Love blah blah blah Teilhard blah blah blah forget natural law blah blah blah forget revelation blah blah blah gay marriage is the source and summit of all that is noble, good and true blah blah blah.

A reading from the book of Judges:

And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals; 12 and they forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; they went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were round about them, and bowed down to them; and they provoked the Lord to anger. 13 They forsook the Lord, and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. 14 So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them; and he sold them into the power of their enemies round about, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. 15 Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them; and they were in sore straits. (Judges 2:11-15)

Happy Easter from Chez Shea

in which we get goofy for the microphone.

Gone for the Triduum

May God our Father bless each one of you through the crucified and Risen Lord Jesus!

Prayers

...for David Morrison who is grieving the loss of his father. And for my dear friend Sherry Weddell, whose father is gravely ill.

May God grant eternal rest to David's father and peace and healing to Sherry's father and family, through our Lord Jesus.

Boston Globe Suddenly Conceives an Intense Interest in the Eucharist

I don't see why people can't be communed via the cup. It's all Jesus. There's something awfully staged about these sob stories.

States, industry in reckless, breathless, heedless headlong rush for massive biotech $$$$$$$$$!!!

But we can rest assured that these people have only the highest ethical considerations in mind and that they will *always* keep in mind the good of the human person.

No. Really.

Quietly, quietly, the gospel makes inroads in the Islamosphere

Sleep Well

Hero Punished by Incompetent Bureaucratic Boobs

Generation Narcissus Breeds a New Generation of People who Believe in Themselves

And lo, it is written in the book of the Prophet Chesterton:

THOROUGHLY worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.” I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.” And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?” After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

NY Times Pet Episcopalian Barks at Dunces Who Think God Answers Prayer

It's all so tiresomely predictable. "Responsible" Christians know that God doesn't answer prayer, etc. blah blah.

Yes, prayer is not a mechanistic process. Yes, God is not a vending machine. Yes, God is not at our beck and call.

But for cryin' out loud! Huge swaths of Christian prayer (like all prayer) are *petitionary* prayers. Asking God for stuff. Asking God to bring certain events to pass. Asking God for help. Asking this, asking that (including prayers for healing). To be sure, God is not *bound* to grant our prayers. But it's just as damn sure that we *are* commanded to pray for God's active involvement in the course of human affair and that, in fact, "you do not have, because you do not ask." In other words, as "participants in the divine nature" our prayers really matter and really do (by grace) influence the course of events.

But when you are the Episcopal attack Pekingnese for the NY Times, your masters are already bring you all the kibble 'n bits you need, so why bother praying?

Seattle Times: Feebs Cost Taxpayer $$$. If they were real patriots they'd be glad to off themselves

Spoken with True Compassion[TM] of course.

Meanwhile, Operation Rescue Adopts "All or Nothing" Strategy that has been such a winer for ALL.

The NY Times only wants what's best for pro-lifers

In their infinite compassion, they stoop down to us and say, "It's futile. You better just give up now. No used beating your head against the wall."

This is one of those stories where I'd love to hear both sides

Right now, it reads like an advertisement for a giant corporation. It may well be that the archbishop and co. are, in fact, liberation theology nitwits. But I'd kinda like to hear the other side of things before immediately trusting the corp's account of itself.

When you cry "Wolf!"...

then it's harder to sell your case the next time around.

MSM Outlet has accidental pro-life moment

Somebody in the Lowerarchy slipped up. Doubtless they are now spending time in one of the Houses of Correction.

MTV Courageously Mocks Crucifixion, Pope

Because the Vatican does not issue fatwas.

Check out the Art of Joseph Criscuoli

Hollywood Confidential

The gig in Hollywood went well, I thought. Basically, it was me and four Evangelicals sitting in these cool directors chairs on a stage gabbing about The Da Vinci Code. The host was a lovely man named Doug Millham, a local Presby pastor, who asked us each a couple of questions and then gave us about 10 minutes to sort of give our thesis statement. As the lone RC guy there, I tried to keep it short and on-topic, basically presenting a brief argument that Brown is, not to put too fine a point on it, a liar and a fraud waging a malicious campaign of deceit against the Church. Others made other contributions, some of which I agree with and some of which I profoundly disagreed with (one panelist seriously tried to argue that "42 million readers can't be wrong" and so the book must be good because it says "seek the truth" and so it must be all about seeking the truth).

One was tempted to get into an extensive argument over this naked capitulation to the argumentum ad populorum, but I thought it would be more prudent to simply maintain the focus on the fact that whatever 42 million people might think, Dan Brown was a demonstrable liar who agenda was nothing less than an all-out assault on orthodox Christianity and the establishment of a pagan feminist creation myth. The audience seemed to resonate with this, so I was happy I was able to make my points without getting into a cross-denomination tussle that would only have served to alienate people. In fact, I was able to have a bit of fun by thanking this overwhelmingly Evangelical organization for mounting this all-out effort to defend the Catholic Church. :)

It seemed to me that most of the crowd got the fact that The Da Vinci Code does not mean well and is not just trying to spark a conversation about Jesus. Most of the panelists emphasized that this was an "evangelization opportunity" (which I agree with). I was more or less the fly in the ointment who was pointing out that it is an opportunity in the sense that the betrayal of Judas and the Crucifixion was an opportunity. We mustn't suppose that every fan of the book (much less the author) is serious about "seeking the truth". Not a few (particularly the author) are enemies of the gospel.

On a curious note, at least two audience members in their questions said they had no problem with Jesus being married and having an active sex life. This seemed to be met with a general murmur of assent, though it was hard to tell because the house was hard to see over the lights. So it seemed like a little catechesis about the sacramentality of marriage and the significance of celibacy was in order, particularly since most people did not seem to be getting the fact that, in Brown's world, the divine is about sex, while in the real world, sex is about the divine. It seemed to be real news to many people that Christ's celibacy was *significant*, that is, that it *signified* something. Many people seemed both surprised and delighted to hear this. So that was a happy moment for me. I enjoy it when some teaching of the Faith makes the lights come on in my own head so I enjoy watching the lights go on in other folks' minds too.

Afterwards, I went off to munch something at the local Denny's with Barb Nicolosi, that shy and reticent wallflower. Somehow, I managed to pry from her her thoughts on the book as well as many other things. Friends of Barb know how hard it is to get her to open up and speak her mind. :)

Barb was the main reason I was there that night and I thank her for making it happen. Apparently they'd approached her, but she knew herself well enough to know that her abiding hatred of the book would simply have lead to an extended rant (something I have given in to my own self in the presence of friends when I was writing Da Vinci Deception). But she still knew there should be a Catholic on the panel (since, in Brown's world, there is no other Church besides "the Vatican"). I deeply appreciate her seeing to it that this happened. I had a blast and I met some new friends, both Catholic and Evangelical, as a result.

Oh, and I got to eat breakfast at Mel's Diner (American Graffiti) and stand in Gene Kelly's footprints at Graumann's Chinese Theatre, across the street from my hotel.

It look like I will be going back to H'wood soon, thanks to the ministrations of a the Catholic laity down there (thanks, Kale and Spencer!) to give a full-blown talk on Da Vinci, as well as perhaps do something for Act One. We'll see how it all pans out.

Thanks again to the omnicompetent Brenda Salmon and the whole gang at Inter-Mission for a fun and informative evening. I learned from Craig Smith that the notion that a rabbi had to be married was actually a development of post-Temple rabbinic Judaism, consequently, when people address Jesus as "rabbi" in the gospels, it does not imply he was married. Didn't know that.

A reader writes...

...concerning this post:

Could you do me a favor and tell me what kind of evangelical church this was? I've never heard of any well-known Evangelical Christian church teaching the above. In fact this is totally NEW to me and I thought Ive heard it all.

It was not a well-known church. It was a group of Evangelical converts who more or less coalesced out of the ether on a dorm floor at the University of Washington. This sort of thing happens in non-denom circles all the time.

The basic story is this: a guy named John Greer came to study molecular biology at the UW. He was a new convert from Spokane whose pastor had belonged to a flat-footed Pentecostal sect as a boy. The pastor had been taught that a literal, physical New Jerusalem was going to fall out of the sky ("I saw the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven") and land on top of the old Jerusalem (allegedly there is a patch of sky in the northern hemisphere where there are no stars and it would come through that "hole").

Well, like young men do, the pastor eventually rejected this flat-footed literalism. However, his rejection was so strong that he embraced flat-footed spiritualism. He decided that all that business about the Second Coming was too literalistic and formulated the notion that since the Kingdom is spiritual (by which he meant "disembodied") then the Second Coming and all the other physical features of the Christian tradition were spiritual too. He was a gnostic without realizing it. Consequently, John was taught that the Second Coming was basically Pentecost and things like baptism and communion were to be understood "spiritually" as referring to the baptism in the Holy Spirit and the communion of the Christ in me with the Christ in you.

Given the initial premises, it's a perfectly logical system. In other respects, the church was indistinguishable from any Evangelical group: very high view of Scripture, need to ask Jesus into your heart as personal Lord and Savior, strong emphasis on discipleship, belief in the Incarnation and Resurrection and so forth.

There's no such thing as Protestantism. There are only Protestantisms and they are as numerous and varied as Protestants.

Ciao, dahlings!

I'm off to Hollywood for the big Da Vinci Confab at Hollywood Presbyterian this evening.