Blogging's Going to Sparse for the Next Week or So

I've got a lot of catch up to do and (Bum ba BUM!) I'm beginning the edits on the Mary book in preparation for breaking it into a trilogy. Only one of me and lots to do, plus we have to get the financial nose above water here at Chez Shea. So writing being a zero sum game, the blog will be sacrificed till we have made sure all the balls in the air are humming in synchronicity.

See you when I see you!

Consider it a hostage exchange, Chris. We got Dwight Longenecker and Al Kimel, you got Matt Fox and this guy

Rats Leave Sinking Ship

Tenet is known as the guy who called evidence of Iraqi WMD a "slam dunk." He's mad about this. It's not that he didn't say it, you see, it's that he was taken out of context. Tenet claims that he told the president that he could improve the weak case for Iraqi WMD and make it a "slam dunk" case. Is Tenet's version supposed to make him look any better?

Rather than focus on his own costly errors, he ranted over how "despicable" it was that someone high up leaked the "slam dunk" information. "Men of honor don't do this," he told 60 Minutes. But neither do men of honor volunteer to craft a "slam dunk" case when the evidence doesn't rate it.

One gets less and less of an impression of competence or honesty in All the President's Men. Lucky for him the Congress is run by bumbling nincompoops too.

Prayers for Bp. Mengeling

St. Peregrine, pray for us!

Nice Takedown of New Yorker Slash and Burn of Benedict

Best paragraph:

Finally, Jane Kramer really ought to find herself some new Roman sources. The men she cites remind me of nothing so much as those unfortunate Japanese soldiers found on remote Pacific islands in the 1970s – men who never, somehow, got the word that Emperor Hirohito had packed it in thirty-some years before. One of her-refugees-from-radicalisms-past sighs that Vatican II was “the 1968 of the Catholic Church.” Memo to source: It’s over. Get over it.

Jews Go Ahead and Say What Many Conservative Christians Long to Say But Cannot Because the Lord Forbids It

That is, if one is to infer the obvious from the barely concealed (and sometimes open and naked) rejoicing when the death penalty is enforced. All that Thomistic abstraction about satifying justice kind of doesn't persuade when people start waving the frying pans and cheering the death of some major criminal.

This is a classic case of where Judaism is right as far as it goes, it simply does not go far enough. The demands of justice are just. But grace requires more than mere justice.

Dangerous Theocratic Christianist Injects His Faith Directly into His Politics

But that's great because he's Black and a Democrat.

The New York Times observes a time-honored tradition of MSM journalism: the fawning puff piece on the black pol's religious roots, compleat with pictures of his devout granny (who is devoutly Muslim, but that doesn't matter as long as she's cuddly and adorable). Lots of free advertising for the pol's inspirational book too.

It's all so predictable.

Korrektiv is attempting to stir up interest throughout Blogdom in a reading of Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

Here's your chance to get in on the action.

The NY Times Continues to Live Up to the Pulitzer-Winning Standards Set by Walter Duranty

William F. Buckley is a Cut and Run Cowardly Lose-ocrat Who Hates America and George Bush

Or, he's somebody who recognizes the obvious: that we can't win in Iraq.

Gay Blackshirts on the March

Rainbow Fascisti issue death threat against Italian churchman.

Just another day in the world of Tolerance and Diversity.

Failure to accept naturalistic explanations of human origins is spreading

Darwinism as the All Explaining Theory of everything fails to persuade from here to Turkey to Russia to Rome.

Muslims have trouble with it too, which goes to show that one Abrahamic religion is much like another. Speaking of which, the Discovery Institute getd portrayed as a sort of Al Quaeda of intellectual malice, while Benedict gets the standard rhetorical tricks played to make his skepticism about pure materialism look arrogant and obscurantist.

Both in his previous role as the chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and since his enthronement, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has made clear his profound belief that man has a unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom; and that a divine creator has an ongoing role in sustaining the universe, something far more than just “lighting the blue touch paper” for the Big Bang, the event that scientists think set the universe in motion.

It will, of course, be noted that all these are theological and philosophical doctrines about which science qua science can say nothing whatsoever, but as is customary in discussions of the Darwinian Mythos, such teachings are treated as though they are "Darwin-bashing", to quote the piece.

Of course, there is the Plucky Rebel Alliance trying to keep the absurdly ignorant Pope from going off the deep end. In particularly, there is the heroic Fr. Coyne who appears in the article as the Voice of Reason trying to reel Benedict in and standing tall against nameless "Catholic mystics" who "insist that mystical communion with God is radically different from observation or speculation by the human brain". Will Benedict listen to Reason or will he side with "mystics" in the "Thinking is Hard" camp? The drama! The tension!

What is not mentioned, of course, is that Fr. Coyne seems to not know what he is talking about, at least when it comes to theology.

Especially fetching is how the reporter undoes all the hard work Stephen Barr did in his First Things exchange with Cdl. Schoenborn, aiming to show that "random" means "uncorelated" and not "purely accidental". Barr wrote:

The word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated. My children like to observe the license plates of the cars that pass us on the highway, to see which states they are from. The sequence of states exhibits a degree of randomness: a car from Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Florida, and so on—because the cars are uncorrelated: Knowing where one car comes from tells us nothing about where the next one comes from. And yet, each car comes to that place at that time for a reason. Each trip is planned, each guided by some map and schedule. Each driver’s trip fits into the story of his life in some intelligible way, though the story of these drivers’ lives are not usually closely correlated with the other drivers’ lives.

Now compare and contrast this with the Economist:

For Father Coyne, belief in man's unique status is entirely consistent with an evolutionary view of life. “The fact we are at the end of this marvellous process is something that glorifies us,” he says.

But Benedict XVI apparently wants to lay down an even stronger line on the status of man as a species produced by divine ordinance, not just random selection. “Man is the only creature on earth that God willed for his own sake,” says a document issued under Pope John Paul II and approved by the then Cardinal Ratzinger.

For the Economist, it's either/or. Either "random selection" (by which the author means "man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind") or else the man is a deliberate creation of God.

This, again, is ultimately a philosophical and theological issue, not a scientific one. Yet the apostles of the Darwinian Mythos at the Economist quite nicely succeed in making the average member of the Chattering Classes choke on their lattes at the thought that ignorant religious obscurantists are just about to launch a pan global jihad against the March of Science.

Should be entertaining to watch as more people cease to be convinced of the Darwinian All Explaining Theory of Materialist Everythingism, especially as Benedict quietly trains his keen intellect on the question.

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from carbon-Purgatory springs

A new religion apparently is developing a new system of salvation. I just hope Mother Earth forgives us.

Can't help but feel affection for ol' Shoutin' Bill

He sometimes goes off half-cocked and doesn't know what he's talking about, but his hearts in the right place, and on the main point, he's perfectly right: Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. Catholics who wish he'd pipe down could solve their troubles easily, by piping up and making his disappear in a crowd instead letting him stand out as one of the few public Catholics who won't just stand there and take it.

It would probably help to know what "environmentalism" and "religion" are before attempting an answer

But that's asking an awful lot of the media.

Jerry and Barbara Crick Update

Barb writes:

I feel rather late in putting out another update. Taking care of Jerry is very time consuming and demanding, so I rarely have time to tend to the little stuff in my life - like checking my email or composing updates.

Please know that your help is enabling us to continue Jerry's much needed medical care. We appreciate your kindness so much! I get a bit panicky from time to time, wondering what I would do if the funds dried up - and then God and His cohorts come through again! He never ceases to astound me, and His saints are amazing blessings!

Someone recently asked me how I reconcile what we're going through with my faith. I answered that, while it's true we're losing our house and facing bankruptcy, and that I'm overworked, exhausted, and misunderstood (mostly by my boss - I wish she'd stop asking me for overtime and start recognizing how hard I'm working to please her - waaah!), I still feel a bit like Mephibosheth (2 Samuel, chapter 9) - rather spoiled by the King and His servants. People have been so kind! Folks have helped with housework, yard work, food and finances. People we know and many we have never met have sent encouraging notes stuffed with the promises of prayer. The prayer, unseen but potent, is meeting powerful unseen and practical needs.

As far as the carbon monoxide poisoning, Rachel's and Grayce's headaches and nausea have cleared up. I didn't even realize that I was having headaches till they went away. Jerry still struggles, of course, having been in a weakened state already and then taking the hardest hit. Although he does better at times, he still has a long way to go, and we don't yet know if he's out of the woods. For one thing, he keeps going into acidosis, and scaring the heck out of us! His doctor here is keeping a close eye on him and even came for another house call! He's great!

I am trying to convince Jerry to go see the specialist in LA again, but he's protesting. "What good will it do?" he says. (Think maybe he's depressed?) I say that the first visit to the specialist helped a lot, and since this guy is probably the person in the United States who knows the most about toxicity and he has umpteen years of experience, we might let him decide what good it would do. Anyway, that's a prayer focus for now.

And then God...! Barbara

Your continued prayers and financial support for this struggling family will really help. Write me privately and I will give you their address.

The Hindu sez some guy named William Gray sez the oceans cause Global Warming, Not CO2.

Meanwhile, some other guy says that Global Warming will weaken the hurricans some guy named Al Gore said would be strengthened by Global Warming.

The Experts Speak!

Portrait of a Typical Non-Denom Evangelical Church

What many Catholics need to absorb about people like the pastor in this story is that they are often in no meaningful sense "Protestant" (and, accordingly, to refrain from speaking to and about about them as though they are either stupid or in wilful rebellion against the Church). When a couple of dope heads who know from nothing about theology kneel on the carpet and ask Jesus to save them, they are taking a step toward the Church, not away from it, and the proper response of a Catholic is rejoicing, not fault-finding. Sure, they've got a lot to learn, but the basic fact is, they aren't protesting anything: they are trying to follow Jesus according to their best light.

Remember Priscilla and Aquila.

Reader Kathleen writes:

Could you please put out a prayer request for my Aunt Genevieve? She is true blue Catholic and has had a great share of Crosses in her life.

She has taken a bad turn this week suddenly.

Prayer is a great comfort for the living if nothing else, but also we know it goes far beyond that.

You'd love this lady. Widowed at 43 with three kids and somehow she did it on her own with the Divine assistance of the Church.

I don't know how this is going to turn out, there is hope, but I'd appreciate prayers for the best for her.

May God grant her healing or, if it is not his will, the grace of a happy death in Christ our Lord.

New Blog!

Anything called "The Ride of the Rohirrim" already has my sympathies.

Chuck Colson is a Mensch

Fr. Rob Johansen is fine!

He just called, greatly amused, to inform me there has been no heart attack.

Thanks be to God!

Update: Fr. Rob blogs that the rumors of his impending death are greatly exaggerated.

Why I Find On-Line Discussions about Liturgy So Worthless

When I say the Mass is the Mass, it means simply this: any Mass Holy Mother Church says is an act of worship worthy of God the Father is good enough for me. My place is to worship and receive, not squint and criticize. I actually *enjoy* going to Mass. And I personally prefer the Paul VI rite (reverently celebrated, of course).

In a sane world, none of this would be controversial, just as the preference others have for the Tridentine, Syro-Malabar, or Byzantine rite would be non-controversial. It is, after all, called the Catholic Church.

But this is St. Blog's, not the sane world.

And so, of course, various liturgical obsessives bear out everything I said last week by putting insulting questions, filling their posts with Spite for Christ, and generally incarnating what I said about why it is I find such discussions, not only dull beyond words, but profoundly toxic and counter-productive. Here are some choice words from the Angelqueen forum, which labor to show that, for Rad Trads, rage about liturgy trumps the fruit of the Spirit:

They got it all figgered' out in their work-a-day minds - a Mass, is a Mass, is a Mass. "Duh-um... uhhhh, shouldn't the newbies hear the Mass in their own language? Uh, um ya know, so they can understand it better and uh, follow along."

Lesson: People who celebrate the Mass in the vernacular are stupid. So is Holy Church, for promulgating a vernacular Mass.

Someone who does not deserve to call himself a Catholic wrote:

And finally, this sums up what I think and I appreciate the reader who said it for me, so I don't have to write it:

The Mass is the Mass is the Mass.

And finally, this sums up what I think of this ignoramus and I have to write it myself:

That ass is an ass is an ass.

Lesson: If I am content with a reverently celebrated Paul VI Mass, I do not deserve to call myself a Catholic.

That's exactly what Msgr. Caulkins told me in Rome. And he's the man you go to in order to try and mediate an indult for your diocese. He said a Mass is a Mass is a Mass verbatim.

Lesson: Somebody named Msgr. Caulkins is clearly either a fool or an evil bureaucrat who is too stupid to see the goodness and justice of people like the members of the Angelqueen forum. His contemptible notion that the Mass is the Mass is renders him, at least, suspect in his competence and, quite probably, "Someone who does not deserve to call himself a Catholic". It is inexplicable why he might not instantly acquiesce to the demands of people who routinely talk this way about him.

The Novus Ordo is sacrilege and my silence and acceptance of it constitutes approval and makes me an accessory to the sins of those who willingly engage in the sacrilege.

Lesson: The Paul VI Mass is a sacrilege. The members of Angelqueen demonstrate this constantly by the contrast of their lives with those who worship in the Paul VI rite. None of this "fruit of the Spirit" stuff for them. Just a focus on the manly virtues of rage, factionalism, contempt, suspicion, bitterness, and fear.

Then, there's this fascinating tripartite exchange, in which the question is never, "How can we respect and honor our brother's and sisters in Holy Church who worship God with all their heart, mind and strength?" but is instead a strategy session for dealing with an alleged "ploy" by the "enemy". Trad A sez:

The Mass is a Mass argument though forces supporters of the Latin rite into areas which we probably shouldn't go and that is whether the Pauline rite is fundamentally flawed - or worse - invalid. If this were a game of chess we appear to be checkmated by this latest ploy. I certainly am of the opinion that we have to avoid this line of argument in order not to be drawn into the quicksand of valid/invalid. Or toeing a careful line have to endure their glee at the impasse.

It's probably more of a weakness in the Indult argument than with the Society which avoids dealing with valid/invalid and rests the case on the argument of simply questionable which is sufficient in my mind.

Trad B replies:

There is certainly no "checkmate" here, not anything even close. Nor is this an area where we are treading on shaky ground. There is ample and well-supported argument for avoiding the NO. One does not have to argue invalidity to strongly make the case that the NO is a bad idea at best, and a danger to souls at worst. One might just as well say "a Mass is a Mass is a Mass" as say "a priest is a priest is a priest". You can have a good and holy priest who is a credit to the Church, or you can have a homosexual predator pedophile heretic. Is heeding and supporting one just the same as heeding and supporting another? I don't think so.

And Trad C sums things up:

She's right, 220. Marybonita bingoed this bad boy. Note that she said "we appear to be checkmated". The faster people understand what she understands here, the less they will fall into traps laid out by the enemy.

Lesson: If I attend the Paul VI rite and am content there, I am the Enemy. Also, I am a *cunning* enemy who is using a "ploy" because I don't care if you worship God in any rite Holy Church approves. Oh, and approval of the Paul VI rite is like approval of homosexual predator pedophile heresy.

After this comes a recommendation of Some Book by Fr. Blah-di-Blah who has again proven that Holy Church is wrong and so are the Enemy who attend the Paul VI Mass. It concludes:

This book explains at length and proves the truth that Catholics who have prided themselves as being faithful and obedient to legitimate authority by going to the New Mass have, in fact, been misled. With the knowledge that this book brings, all Novus Ordo Catholics must reform themselves by going only to the Tridentine Mass from now on.

Lesson: If you attend the Paul VI Mass, you are prideful, but your guilt is mitigated by ignorance because you have been misled. However, you are now bound to join True Catholics at the Tridentine Rite because the New Dispensation makes Angelqueen and Fr. Blah-di-Blah the only reliable magisterium.
Trad B then replies to Trad C:

You always "appear to be checkmated" when you make ill-advised or unfounded arguments. You will neither "appear" to be checkmated, nor be checkmated in reality, when you attack properly armed. You don't really think I was advocating bringing a knife to a gun fight, do you?

Lesson: The somebody who does not deserve to call himself Catholic (because of the grave sin of celebrating and being nourished by and worshiping God in the Paul VI rite) is not just a cunning enemy, he is trying to destroy True Catholics like the denizens of Angelqueen, and it is imperative that the *right weapons* be used to destroy the enemy.
And finally there is this beautiful coda from Trad C:

Most traditional Catholics do, yes, when they don't distinguish properly; the enemy lays out a truth "the Mass is the Mass", and then someone comes along and says the Novus Ordo is harmful, no one takes the time to make the proper distinctions, two camps are formed, and both camps persist in being both right and wrong at the same time.

Precision and accuracy; there is a difference, both are necessary, and there is no substitute for being right.


_________________
The Blessed Sacrament is Heaven on Earth

Lesson: Well, the picture says it all, doesn't it? But the sig file is precious too.

To give full credit, the authors of the above exchange somewhat mysteriously draw the line at sentiments like this:

Looks like there are some people who can't see the traps correctly. It takes time I guess. Grace? Who knows. The traps are the Conciliar Church and BLEEP! By attending the Novus Ordo one is going into the schismatic Conciliar Church which Our Lord said is the inner chambers/closets in Matthew 24. BLEEP! is the desert in Matthew 24-also schism. We're talking about a war between 2 religions. We fall onto the other side in the NO and we don't even bother to enter the battlefield and/or are sabotaging from the Catholic side in BLEEP!

But given all the language of "enemies" and the imagery of fighting they employ, it's a little hard to see why. Maybe terms like "schism" spook them. Or maybe the "BLEEP"s of the tinfoil hat wearer gave them that "don't stand so close to me" feeling. I dunno.

Now, compare and contrast the fruits of the spirit(s) above with that of this comment:

When I travel out of my own diocese, I sometimes attend celebrations of Holy Mass that contain liturgical irregularities that upset me very much. (The "cry room" for parents with wailing babies has sometimes been my refuge, actually. Kind of drowns out the objectionable stuff going on in the liturgy.)

Today on Saint Catherine of Siena's Day, I'm meditating on the fact that as Catholics we all need each other. We are all part of the Body of Christ. The Trads might look askance at me for my lack of devotion to the Latin Mass. But I think the Church needs those Catholics. And I personally need them. The Church would be less without them, and so would I.

The individuals who organize the (illegal) liturgical dance (the performance of which sends me to the "cry room)? The Church also needs those Catholics, and I personally need those Catholics. We would be less without them. We don't need their mistakes, but we do need them.

Those Catholics who would condemn my preference for a standard Novus Ordo celebrated the way the Holy Father himself might do? The Church needs those Catholics, and I personally need those Catholics. We would be less without them. I don't need their condemnation, but I need them.

The members of the congregation who annoy me by the way they dress, or act, or arrive late, or leave early, or talk during the service; the liturgist, the cantor, the priest who don't do their jobs the way they're supposed to: the Church needs every one of them. And I personally need every one of them, too. And, I suppose, the Church needs me, too. We are all one Body. And we all need one another. To say "I don't need you" is the worst thing of all.

Marion 04.29.07 - 9:52 pm #

I have this notion that the members of Angelqueen will find themselves in heaven because of the intercession of "enemies" like Marion, God bless her.

I have this settled and fixed opinion that Tom is perfectly right: online discussions of liturgy (and worse still, online discussions of online discussions of liturgy) are, for the most part, not worth the ASCII they're written in.

Oh, and if you are thinking of cluttering my combox with more condemnations for my lack of interest in liturgy wars, or to explain to me my perfidy, sinfulness and general evil for being content with a reverently celebrated Paul VI rite, please know in advance I will delete it. Likewise, if you have an urge to say that celebrants of the Tridentine rite are ipso facto Bad People, your post will be deleted. My sole concern, a la Romans 14 is that everybody do what they do to the glory of God and not waste time judging each others liturgical preferences.

Urgent Prayer Request!

A reader writes:

Please pray for Fr. Rob Johansen. You may remember that he used to have a blog called "Thrown Back" (long abandoned). I'm told Fr. had a serious heart attack and they're not sure if he'll pull through. Let's storm heaven!

Chez Shea will gather the troops to pray in a little bit.

Kate Schori Takes Up the White Man's Burden

Having stooped down to enlighten Catholics who toil in the ignorance of dullards like Aquinas, Augustine, Teresa Benedicta, John Paul II and Benedict, the head of the Episcopal Church now cast her gaze to the Dark Continent and stretches out her merciful porcelain white hand to pull the savages up from their barbaric belief in ordinary Christian moral teaching and theology.

Nay! Dry the starting tear! It is the least that a Truly Enlightened (both theologically and dermatologically) race can do!

Meanwhile, sane Anglicans continue to try to figure out what to do now that liberal racists have taken over the American branch of their Church. I know of at least one Anglical bishop and a bunch of priests in South Australia who are champing at the bit for reunion with Rome. I'll be delighted if the Ents in Rome and elsewhere finally make a way for it to happen.

Not the least of Hitler's crimes...

...is the fact that he killed a growing interest in Christ among Jewish intelligentsia as diverse as Buber, Einstein, and Chagall. There was some remarkable attempts by Jews to come to grips with Jesus in the years before the war. But a great deal of that was drowned out in the polarization of religious conversation that took place after the war due to the Holocaust. A great "Might Have Been", courtesy of Satan.

When the Prez is willing to go to the mat defending an incompetent boob and liar like Alberto Gonzales (former counsel for that American Success Story, ENRON)...

When senators of his own party are saying ""This is the most incompetent White House I've seen since I came to Washington"...

What good reason do I have left for believing him when he insists that this disastrous war is winnable and we must just go on going on in saecula seculorum? I reluctantly begin to think that Dreher is right.

John Shelby Spong and Co Keep Offering Prescriptions to Save the Dying Church

It turns out that...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (CNS) - Total membership in U.S. Christian churches continued to rise in 2005, despite ongoing declines in some of the country's largest mainline Protestant churches, according to the 2007 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

****

The Catholic Church remained the largest Christian church in the U.S. in 2005 with a reported membership of 69,135,254, or nearly 42 percent of all Christian church membership.

With an increase of 1.94 percent over its previous year's total, the Catholic Church was also among the fastest-growing of the nation's 25 largest churches, followed closely by the Assemblies of God, which recorded 1.86 percent growth, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with 1.63 percent growth.

It would appear that, at minimum, religious groups that actually believe what they teach have a distinct tendency to persuade more people than groups which spend all their time ridiculing their own beliefs and apologizing for existing.

This is not the sine qua non of religious belief, of course. It may well be that, like Spong, you *do* advocate a system of belief that is fundamentally false and that you therefore do well to be filled with regret for it. It may be that, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you do have a religious system that is demonstrably false. It may be that your religious system is partly right, but has lost track of other truths that are part of the fullness of revealtion. In all such cases, mere self-confidence is not an argument for the truth of a religious belief. But in every case, it does suggest that the notion of a mainstream Protestantism that tries to cozy up to jolly pagans by wringing its damp hands and saying, "You don't have to believe in Christ to be a Christian" is a non-starter.

Gay Brownshirts on the March!

Tolerance is not enough. You. Must. Approve! You. Must. Ordain!

Coming soon to a country near you.

Good for the bishops!

I can think of a couple of "apostolates" they might scrutinize right here at home.

Yes, 200 million is a large number and a very big problem

The thing is, a billion is an even larger number and an even bigger problem. So it still seems to me to be sane to try to cultivate relationships with the 75% of Muslims who *don't* like al-Quaeda than to treat Islam as a monolith and wind up needlessly recruiting all one billion into the enemy camp.

Tendentious Scripture Readers for Homosexual Practice!

I'm with the spray painter. Every one of these readings of Scripture are so preposterous, so agenda-driven, and so grossly foreign to the text that only a culture as biblically-illiterate as ours could stroke its chin and say, "Gosh! This is deep!"

The plain fact is, Paul expresses the normative attitude of the Church when he writes (without any controversy at all from the alleged crowds of homosexual activist who were accepted everywhere in the early church) that one of the many results of of human sin is this:

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Likewise, he takes it as given that:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And in this, he is simply reflecting that the teaching of the law--the law that Jesus said he had not come to abolish.

So does that mean homosexuals are rejected by Christ? Of course not. It just means (as has been said umpteen times) that homosexual practice is not "affirmed" by Christ any more than any other act of sex outside a valid marriage between a man and a woman. Homosexual *desire* is no more sinful than than the desire to steal that we refuse to act upon. Indeed, such concupiscence, successfully resisted is (particularly in our culture) heroic virtue. But it is a lie to say that Jesus affirms homosexual acts as good. He doesn't.

Good! Rome has taken up the question of Global Warming

There is probably no institution on earth more immune to hysteria and ill-considered panic attacks than the Vatican. I will be interested to see how they digest the data. Of course, the merely fact that they had a meeting and some functionary somewhere made a couple of obvious observations about the biblical call for stewardship of the earth is being taken by the Grope and Flail as something akin to a dogmatic endorsement of the entire Panic Agenda of the Left. I'm pretty skeptical that the Church will issue and encyclical on global warming anytime soon. But I am glad that Rome is beginning its typical long slow ent-like process of ruminating on the question. Them I trust.

The Expected Mewling and Whining from the Times

There's a lot of hope here

The rising generation wants to undo some of the cultural and familial damage inflicted by Generation Narcissus. May God bless them!

I Prescribe Homeschooling and Killing Your Television

Also, constant love, prayer and laughter, coupled with a regular encounter with good art that shows both the darkness of the world and the redemptive power of Christ. These should be administered daily by participants in intact marriages with as many children as possible.

Oddly, our civilization think almost everything is more important than that, but especially money, sex, and power. Even more oddly, we are mystified by the predicament in which we find ourselves.

Dave Hartline is on Catholic Exchange Today!

New Blog

"But Mark! That blog is about the indult and the Rosary in Latin! I thought you hated the Latin Mass and Traditionalists!"

This myth, along with the myth that "I refused to ever define torture" is one of the great mysteries of the universe to me. I don't know how many different way I can say I don't care if you go to a Latin Mass, just so long as you don't disparage the majority of the Church that doesn't. I have not problem with people with Trad sensibilities. The only time I have a problem is when somebody insists their Trad sensibility is more important than the unity of the Church, or charity, or the Magisterial office's teaching.

Nonsense! The Beeb has a deep veneration for Mammon, Dionysius, Moloch...

What Christians asking for more "religion" coverage don't seem to realize is that, having denuded the public square of references to Christianity (except hateful ones, of course) the powers of this world will be quite happy to now fill the vacuum with references to "religion". The problem will never be atheism. Atheism is simply the sterilization fluid you spray on the field to kill the indigenous Christian plants. The real goal is to then plant something else. Do recall that the basic narrative of the New Testament indicates, not a final triumph by Islam, but a temporary triumph by anti-christ. That figure is not seen coming from outside the Christian world but from inside. He is not an atheist and he is certainly not a Muslim. He is deeply spiritual. It's just that he Believes in Himself and insists that you do too:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

Quick question: Does such a figure sound more likely to arise in the Islamic world, which has an utter horror of the confusion of creature and Creator--or in the "enlightened post-modern West" which routinely urges us to believe that we are the creators of reality, that is constantly urging us to move past our pathetic humility to God, and that labors to return to a pagan worship of nature and of those special enlightened avatars whom destiny has chosen to free us from the shackles of the God of Abraham and lead us into a future of peaceful prosperous harmony with nature. That may take some sacrifice, as it has in achieving other secular messianic dreams of a Third Reich, or a Triumph of the Proletariat. But then religious visions always require that.

Why Liturgical Obsessives Don't Have Any Friends

Is a so-called Black Mass a Mass also? What I am understanding from the Shea crowd (and I don't mean this in a bad way) is what is important that it be a Mass, and none of the seconday characteristics are important.

Why would any sane person dignify that with an answer?

Also, tiresome is the "Heads we win, tails you lose" argument which goes as follows:

First, one person says something along the lines of:

Educated, doctrinally literate Catholics like you and Tom can take the NO because you know what the church's teachings are on the Eucharist, the Sacraments, Heaven and Hell, and so don't mind if these things are not as present in the N.O. as in the TR. But most Catholics today do not get good Catechism instruction and do not read papal encyclicals. They get nearly all their religious instruction from Sunday Mass. So we owe it to them to make sure Sunday Mass is as edifying, instructive and clear in showing forth the principals of the faith as possible. And in my view the Traditional Rite does that a lot better than the NO.

Now, prescinding from the notion that it is, I think, fundamentally absurd to say that a clueless, badly catechized Catholic who doesn't understand the Paul VI rite (which does, in fact, engage us in participation in the liturgy in a language we understand) will magically be *more* edified by a liturgy in which the laity are spectators watching people do things up on the altar in a language we don't understand--let us accept this point at face value.

The problem is this: when I point out that I find the Paul VI rite quite nourishing, more nourishing, in fact, than the Tridentine, I'm immediately told that "IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU! THE MASS IS ABOUT THE WORSHIP OF GOD!"

When I say "The Paul VI Mass is, according to the Church, about the worship of God too" I am immediately told that it's inferior because all the abuses are a distraction to people with Traditional sensibilities and that even a reverently celebrated Paul VI is still so intrinsically "painful" that I ought to acknowledge the intrinsic superiority of the Tridentine rite. When I note that it causes me no pain and I find it helps me put my mind on God, I'm again told it's not about me.

Clearly, the message is "It's not about God, it's about the sensibilities of the Traditionalist-minded." The Traditionalist-minded are welcome to their sensibilities and I wish them joy when the motu proprio comes out. But it's just not an issue for me and I would appreciate it if I could get on with my worship without being told I'm a second-class, narcissistic Catholic because I think the Church's reform of the liturgy was, on the whole, a good move.

Two final points. Albertus M sums up how this conversation has gone:

There seems to be 2 completely different arguments going on here.

One side is saying, "The Paul VI Mass works just fine for me."

The other keeps saying, "Oh, but there are so many terrible things that Fr. Dissenter does when he says the Mass in English."

These are two completely different arguments! Both can be right without contradicting each other.

Priests who licitly say the Tridentine Mass reverently are doing a very good thing. Priests who do not are doing a bad thing.

Priests who licitly say the Pauline Mass reverently are doing a very good thing. Priests who do not are doing a bad thing.

If the Pope today decreed that henceforth all Masses had to be Latin Tridentine Masses now, we would still have the real problem: priests who insist on saying the Mass irreverently. That suggests that all this arguing about which Mass is better or more reverent is completely missing the point.
Albertus M | | 04.27.07 - 10:36 am | #

Just so. Likewise, this observation from Tom Kreitzberg is spot on:
Godwin's Law for Liturgical Discussions: As an online discussion on the Mass grows longer, the probability of a reference to clown Masses approaches one.

There should be a corollary: Whoever refers to clown Masses as something common or typical loses.
Tom | | Email | Homepage | 04.27.07 - 10:15 am | #

And finally, this sums up what I think and I appreciate the reader who said it for me, so I don't have to write it:

The Mass is the Mass is the Mass.

Every Christian Mass/Liturgy/Rite approved of for use by the Catholic Church is, in its essence, the action of Jesus as both Priest and Victim, offering Himself to God on our behalf; and we Redeemed Christians joined with Him at the altar in the renewal of the Sacrifice of the New Covenant and then we Christians consuming the Heavenly Banquet/New Covenant Meal; Jesus, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, Substantially present in the Eucharist.

It has ever been thus beginning with The Last Supper and the reality some commentators will be forever heaping their complaints upon the coals of resentment in the Thuribles of Traditionalism can not obscure that reality.

And I have never met anybody who approves of Liturgical abuse - in any Liturgy, Mass, or Rite.
I'm Not Spartacus | | 04.27.07 - 10:48 am | #

There are no second-class liturgies and there are no second-class Catholics. Period. End of story.

I think we have an early winner for the "Woody Allen Self-Absorbed Ninny of the Year" Award

Read, if you can, this loooong piece of blather from a New York Jewish "feminist science Fiction scholar" who uses the tragedy at VT to tell us that it all reminds her of her: her feelings about VT, her feelings about George Bush, her feelings about being Jewish, her feelings about New York vs. Blackburg, her feeling about her struggle to not take this ocassion to complain about Blackburg for failing to recognize her greatness, her feelings about being a science fiction scholar, her feelings about the murderer as a representative of patriarchy, her feelings about white people, her feelings about being underappreciated, her feelings about her feelings as she works her way toward triumphant emotional breakthrough #9837345938473459487 about her feelings.

One seldom sees such a naked inability to view other people as anything but stimuli to one's own emotional and personal tics and obsessions, nor such a steady and reverent devotion to taking one's own emotional pulse, one's own sense of entitlement, and one's own little grudges. Especially fetching is this generous response to the traumatized families and community of the 32 people murdered at Virginia Tech:

I forgive all the feminist science fiction criticism haters I closely encountered in Blacksburg.

I'm glad we've finally got the right perspective on all that.

This is of a piece with her previous words of consolation to a suffering world, written September 17, 2001 and concluding:

Even though I have just edited a book about the next new millennium, I know that I can't know the future—even if I am a professional science fiction critic. I reach the end of another sentence and type the period and the plane did not
come. I do not want to reread my narrative or to alter what I have said in any way. Again, I just want to be a science fiction critic who has communicated my experience with the science fiction community. No matter what happens, even if New York ceases to exist, my books will be there as long as human civilization exists.

Comforting words indeed!

How Do you Take a Column Like This Seriously?

Much kerfuffle over my liturgical disinterest

Too many gripes to answer so I will just focus on a couple. One guy writes:

I guess I find it strange that you and Tom, among others, are so intent on dismissing the concerns of many good Catholics, and, it seems, those of the pope himself.

Tom makes a pretty good reply here:

This manages to pack many of the worst traits of discussions on the Mass into a single sentence. There's overstatement (two posts in two months is "so intent"), victimhood("dismissing the concerns," how boorish), moral posturing ("many good Catholics"), and implied charges of dissent ("dismissing...the pope himself"), all wrapped up in an obstinate inability ("I guess I find it strange") to accept that lack of interest does not imply a judgment against those who are interested.

To this, I would add the following: There are those of us who are very happy parishioners at parishes which celebrate the Paul VI rite. We don't spend our time fretting that the very rite itself is somehow second-class. We do not telegraph our notion that those who are quite content with the rite are second class Catholics who don't really appreciate the true glory of the Faith which is *really* found in the Tridentine rite. For that *is* what all-too-common statements like this telegraph:

I attend the TLM exclusively: the N.O. hurts like a pair of bad shoes and forces you to think about it too much.

The N.O. practically requires everyone to be a liturgist and a theologian. It's all about inculturation, participation, getting fed spiritually, etc. - that is to say, it is all about me and what the liturgy does or doesn't for me.

Note the double whammy. Not only is the Paul VI rite objectively inferior and there's something "off" about those who don't prefer the Tridentine Rite, but the motivation of people who attend it is "It's all about me". If you attend the Tridentine Rite, you are, quite simply, a Better Sort. You worship God, not yourself.

Now there are Catholics like me who think the Mass is the Mass. We don't think those who prefer the Tridentine Rite are either better or worse Catholics then we. Nor do we regard the Mass as something we are Commissioned By Christ to weigh in the balance and find wanting. To be sure, we dislike liturgical abuses, whether they be the apocryphal clown Mass or the five minute Tridentine Hunting Masses of European nobility (in which the Mass was sped along at light speed so m'lord could get on with his fox hunting expedition). We don't throw the babe out with the bath and say that because the Paul VI liturgy is often abused, it is therefore almost an abuse itself. We go to parishes where the Mass is reverently celebrated and we find it every bit as nourishing to our souls and a full of praise to God as the Tridentine rite is for others. We have this weird notion that our business is to listen and receive, not compare and contrast. We are quite aware of the existence of liturgical abuse, and we try to do something about it when it arises (thankfully a rare event in my parish), but we also figure if the worst martyrdom we ever suffer is having to sing "Anthem", then we are getting off lightly.

Consequently, we lack a lot of interest in the motu proprio. I'm glad Benedict is interested in it. That's his job. I simply don't see why it's my job. My parish is reverently celebrating the Paul VI rite. My job is to receive that gift, not to look it in the mouth and not to suggest that if you like the Tridentine rite instead you are a second class Catholic and a narcissist. It would be nice if enthusiasts for the Tridentine rite could return the favor.

Chris Johnson has way too much fun at the expense of TEC loonies

UN to Africa: Drop Dead

Those Damn Catholics on the Supreme Court Have Hindered Truly Progressive Thought in the Past

The Coming Trendiness in Theology

...will be denial of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The argument goes something like this: God is love. Love does not demand atoning sacrifice but just freely forgives. Jesus came to preach the free forgiveness of God, but was, unfortunately put to death, purely by accident and not in accord with the will of God. His death was not a sacrificial offering to God, because that would make God mean and bloodthirsty and we know that God is love. All that stuff in the New Testament about Jesus' death being a propitiation for sins is either just barbaric Jews like Paul trying to understand the tragedy of Jesus' death in terms of his own culture or else it is barbaric Jews like the evangelists putting words into Jesus' mouth. You know, words like "The Son of Man came into the world to give his life as a ransom for many" and "This is the cup my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant". Jesus could not have said these things because they do not fit with what trendy theologians think, and trendy theologicans have never been wrong in the whole history of the world.

Happily, there are still sane biblical scholars like N.T. Wright, who suggest that perhaps trendy scholars have no applied adequate thought to this mystery.

Look for this trend to infect the preaching and catechesis at your local parish via well-meaning people who sincerely believe the gospel of Niceness is Nice and who are trying to make the baffling teaching of the Church "accessible". Take measures to be educated about the Church's actual doctrine of the atonement so that you can gently point out that Jesus was, in fact, sent by the Father as the atoning sacrifice for our sins and that this shows the mercy, not the bloodthirstiness, of God.

Due Process for Everybody But Priests!

Not a problem though. Not only are these guys just Christians, they are *Catholic* and they are, most despicable of all, priests. So presumption of guilt is just fine.

That's the great thing about "Zero Tolerance" policies. They relieve us of the complicated burden of crap like "thinking", "justice", and "common sense".

Why "Progressive" Christianity is Drivel

This quote says it all:

One press release from TCPC [The Center for Progressive Christianity] states: “one does not need to believe that Jesus is the only way to God in order to be a Christian.”

Um, yes. One does. However, if you are dumb enough to think that unbelievers will be interested in a Christianity that does not ask them to believe what it teaches, you are also dumb enough to think a jolly pagan will get out of bed on Sunday mornings in order to come to your Tea Circle for Recycling, your Panel Discussion on Library Funding, and your Symposium of Greying Turtle-Necked Types Babbling About Conflict Resolution. This is the key point which progressives overlook when they see their own dwindling congregations and declare that Christianity is "dying", even as they scratch their heads in bafflement at the continuing growth of Evangelical and Catholic numbers.

When Beans are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Beans

Don't fart around with Hugh Grant.

Gutsy Kids Like This Give Me Hope

Sun Rises in East, Water Found to Be Wet, Hitchens Hates Religion

I'm sorry, but anything titled "How Religion Poisons Everything" is about as ignorant as you can get. Hitchens is absolutely worthless when he gets on his periodic tears about religion. Christians who look to him as some sort of authority in answering the challenge of Islam are, how does one put this gently?--idiots. There are lots of replies to Islams that don't require a simplistic reductionist materialism, a reflexive hatred of God, and an utter refusal to acknowledge anything good ever having emerged from the tradition of Abrahamic theism.

Episcopal Spine Alert!

Way to go, Abp. Burke!

Ed Peters weighs in here.

CAEI: Bringing people together

I wrote below:

You also seem to assume the normal fundamentalist notion that a believer in the Holy Spirit must assume that his particular religion is 100% right and everybody else is 100% wrong.

And reader "Jeb Protestant" replies:

Mark, would you please give the name of a few "fundamentalists" who believe
this.

Jeb, meet "Ex-Catholic", who cannot read, but who does offer an admirable portrait of the "Everybody who is not on my team is in no way helped by the Holy Spirit" mindset.

This God works via false religions nonsense is one reason I am no longer Catholic.

There is no way, that the Holy Spirit would lead someone to embrace Hinduism or other false religions. That is ANOTHER spirit.God may be leading someone to Him, but it works IN SPITE of the false religions. It is their God-given conscience at battle with the lies and bondage of Satan.
Ex Catholic Email 04.26.07 - 8:25 am #

Deu 7:4 For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.

Yeah I know that's not PC in the land of any "God" will do universalism.

Mark, you've really lost the plot with this one, there is no way that the Holy Spirit would lead someone to Hinduism.
Ex Catholic Email 04.26.07 - 8:35 am #

Open your bible Mark, and check out what it actually teaches for once..

I just have to add more here, since this error is so glaring.

Mark READ YOUR BIBLE:

John 16:13

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.14 He shall glorify me: { Me here is Jesus Christ } for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
Ex Catholic Email 04.26.07 - 9:27 am #

The weird thing about these sorts of Fundamentalist complaints is that so often such people cannot make up their minds. When the Church says (exactly like Jesus in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats and Paul in Romans 2) that it is possible for those who have never heard of Jesus to follow the light of conscience and so open themselves to the saving power of the Spirit (who does not depend on our knowing who he is in order to work for good in our lives) you get gripes like this from people who are smarter than Jesus and Paul. But when the Church points out the fact that the work of the Holy Spirit is ultimately to bring us into full union with Christ and his Body, the Church and the fullness of His revelation subsists in the Catholic church, outside of which, no one can be saved, then they scream, not that the Church is universalist, but that the Church is too exclusive and that we say "only Catholics can be saved". What they typically mean by this is that they demand the Church recognize that they and other Protestant teams they happen to prefer will be saved, but that the Church not recognize that any other unpreferred teams will be saved.

In fact, the Church makes no prognostications on anybody being saved by team membership: not even Catholics (as a cursory reading of Dante will tell you). This leads to further screams from the "eternal securaity" crowd, but we won't go into that here.

Here's the deal: The Church believes that the fullness of Christ's revelation subsists in the Catholic Church and, if you avail yourself of the helps he provides through it, you will certainly be saved. That was the substance of Dominus Iesus in 2000. It was about as far from "All religions are equal" as you can get and many Protestants had hysterics over it. So I'm surprised Ex-Catholic doesn't remember it. Perhaps he/she will go read it and be reconciled with the Church (that is, if he/she is honest when he/she says the Church's alleged universalist teaching was the reason for leaving.)

The Church also says that, if you become convinced that the Church is, in fact, the fullness of revelation and then refuse the offer of union with Her, you will certainly be damned. But the Church recognizes that, though we are bound by the sacraments, God is not bound. He can and does work beyond the boundaries of the visible Church, blowing where he wills. This does not mean that non-Catholics will certainly be saved (we're not even certain all Catholics will be saved). It merely means that Jesus meant business when he described the *surprises* of the "nations" when they discovered that it was really him they were serving (or not) in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Our task as Christians and Catholics is to cooperate with the Spirit to bring our neighbor as close as possible to the fullness of Christ's revelation in the Catholic faith. It is not to offer anti-biblical prognostications on the eternal destiny of people about whom we know nothing.

What people like Ex-Catholic don't seem to realize is that the first practical result of taking his advice is to declare him doomed to hell, since he is not longer in communion with the Church Christ founded. This curious habit of sawing off the branch one is sitting on in order to make sure that those out on the end of the same branch get the judgment they deserve is one of the more curious features of sectarianism. Happily the Church (and the Spirit) neglect to take their advice and continue to labor toward that Day when "all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ."

Al-Reutera: Captions that are Simply Beyond Parody

What I'm doing Tonight and Tomorrow Night

Tonight, I'll be sitting on a panel of folks discussion "Catholic Moral Decision-making" at Blessed Sacrament (my parish) here in Seattle.

Tomorrow night, I'll be introducing Jeffrey Overstreet to the Seattle Chesterton Society and then sitting back for a really great talk.

If you live in the Seattle area, I hope to see you at both these events.

The Achilles Heel of the Anti-Christian

...is that his hostility to the faith keeps him from ever trying to find out about it. He is bound and determined to criticize and so asks questions, not with the intent find out anything, but to keep from finding out anything. Consequently, main profit in answering him is to be gained, not by the the critic, but by those who are genuinely curious and standing on the sidelines. For instance, take this exchange:

"Only the Holy Spirit can work *within* our freedom to bring us to a place which, oddly, feels as though we were destined to come all along."

So presumably conversion to Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism or atheism is the same, right? Any convert can feel like they were destined to arrive at their destination. Any conversion can be quiet and subtle. If there is a Holy Spirit or similar doing this, then it has remarkably diverse plans for different people.
Pejar
Email Homepage 04.25.07 - 2:59 pm #

My reply:

The Holy Spirit is a person, not an "it". And, yes, his plans for each person are quite diverse. You seem to think that's a surprise to a Catholic.

You also seem to assume the normal fundamentalist notion that a believer in the Holy Spirit must assume that his particular religion is 100% right and everybody else is 100% wrong. It doesn't seem to occur to you that a Catholic might well suppose that the Spirit could work in the life of a particular person in such a way as to help them embrace Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism or even atheism, if that choice was the best one they could make given their particular subjective circumstances, and yet that this would not mean anything about the objective falsehood of Christ and his Church. So, for example, a seventh century Arab pagan can well be argued to be taking a step toward the truth when he abandon's paganism for the truth that there is one God, the God of Abraham. A child abused by Christian parents, whose beloved atheist uncle helped him find his feet when he was suicidal, might well embrace his uncle's furious zeal for life and his atheism, out of love. A Hindu who rejects base desires and lives according to the highest tenets of his tradition (as Mother Teresa urged her Hindu friends to do) may very well be responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. None of these subjective choices means that Christianity is false. It only means that Conversion is not team sports. It is the story of the subtle interplay of divine and human freedom, divine truth and human understanding limited by ignorance and sin. The ultimate goal is union with God through Jesus Christ. But God, though hard to satisfy till that goal is reached, is nonetheless easy to please. Any attempt to move toward light is helped, in some degree, by the Spirit.

*******

Now most of this could be figured out without my help, if the questioner were actually asking the question to find something out. But as is manifestly obvious, he is simply indulging the normal anti-Christian habit of quarreling with fundamentalists who lurk in his imagination. About these, he already has a conclusion. His question is simply a way of trying to restate it. About flesh and blood believers, he has no questions at all, for cannot see them because he does not want to see them. He's far enough from Christianity to know little about it and hate it, but not far enough to find it fascinating, as he might find a cargo cult or a Buddhist. He suffers from the same malady Chesterton described long ago:

[T]he next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. ...They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of
universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition: they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

Chesterton not only describes the disease, he prescribes the cure:

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.

Unfortunately, on the internet this sort of intellectual effort is extremely rare.

By the way, since today is my Saint's Day (St. Mark, pray for us)...

I will celebrate by posting my latest on Catholic Exchange and by linking to the latest Homestarrunner Toon.

Easter: When a Young Protestant's Fancy Lightly Turns to Thoughts of the Catholic Faith

Fascinating Piece on Robert Novak's Conversion to the Catholic Faith

Political obsessives will naturally focus on Novak's excommunication from the Church of the End to Evil Crowd in Frum's despicable article. What interests me is how *quiet* the Holy Spirit is and why his wonders never make the six o'clock news. Novak's little encounter with the woman at the dinner table was the spiritual equivalent of a bomb going off. Yet nobody heard it but him. This is extremely typical of the way the Spirit works. An offhand word, and a person's entire universe is changed forever. And, oddly, part of the reason it is so convincing is precisely that the members of the Church aren't clever enough to manipulate us into faith. Indeed, it can't be done by manipulation. Only the Holy Spirit can work *within* our freedom to bring us to a place which, oddly, feels as though we were destined to come all along. It's related to the mystery of falling in love, because it *is* falling in love. It's a complete free choice, and yet you have the strange sense that you and the beloved were "made for each other" from the beginning.

Another Day, Another Reason to Love Disputations

When the sophists start with their glib campaigning -- when you hear "more to being pro-life than being anti-abortion," "concerned for babies after they're born," "policies that will do more to reduce the number of abortions" -- remember that this is the kind of person they want you to admire, this is the level of evil they want you to cooperate with.

And don't take this as an early campaign ad for the G.O.P. The quotations from the Republican candidates are no more a positive reason to vote for them than if they said, "I promise not to raise a zombie army to eat the brains of my political rivals."

God Bless Our Aussie and New Zealand Friends

Reader Don writes from En Zed:

Today is April 25th. Anzac Day. Today we remember the Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps on that fateful day in 1915 who, together with British
troops, landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in North Western Turkey, initiating
the ill conceived campaign to capture the Dardenelles and Istanbul to allow free
passage for the British Navy into the Black Sea during WW1. This day has become,
since 1923, a day to remember all those gallant men who willingly sacrificed
their lives in the cause of freedom, in our part of the world. Even though the
Gallipoli Campaign was a disastrous defeat, it was the event that welded a
bond between Australia and New Zealand which has become stronger with the
passing of the years, and is recognised as a defining moment in the coming of
age - to nationhood - of both countries.

Today, the day is being recognised as a day to remember all people of all
nations who have died in the service of their country in the cause of freedom
throughout all the wars that have afflicted humanity since that time."Greater
love than this has no man, that he lay down his life for his friend".

May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Motu Proprio Mania

Got word yesterday from a well-spaced plource that the long-awaited motu proprio will be out in May. I mention this, not because I care about this, but because so many at St. Blog's do--passionately.

Me: I haven't even bothered to find out what a motu proprio is, nor have I much been interested in the subject of this one. Evidently it consists of props for Latin liturgy, but since my eyes start to cross when St. Blog's falls into its regular habit of obsessing about and arguing over nitnoid details of liturgy, I have habitually skimmed past every panting discussion of the motu proprio, except this one.

I share with Tom Kreitzberg a profound disinterest, not in the liturgy itself, but in liturgy policing. My attitude, like his, is "Just give me my lines and my blocking". I then endeavor to learn and forget about them in precisely the same way I endeavor to break in my shoes. The point of shoes is not to notice them, but to walk in them. Shoes you constantly notice are Bad Shoes. Liturgy you obsess over is liturgy that's not doing it's job, which is to refer us to God, not to itself.

There are two basic reasons you focus on liturgy instead of God, just as there are two reasons a man will focus on his shoes. It may be that the shoes or the liturgy hurt. But it may also be that the man is a hypochondriac who imagines pain where there is none or who grossly exaggerates small irritations into great ones. I've no doubt that there's lots of little and big liturgical abuse out there (which is the fault of the abuser, not the liturgy, and I doubt a motu proprio will stop such people). But I also know there are an awful lot of Liturgical Police in the pews who spend far more time obsessing over nitnoid details of liturgy and grumbling than actually praying. Far better to "look along" the liturgy at God than to spend all one's time looking at it.

Vote for me or things too terrible to describe will happen!!!!!!

This tactic has a limited shelf life. Here's why.

People We Can Do Without, Who Never Will Be Missed

Now if somebody would just tell Nancy Grace to clean out her desk, we could say the media had had the first of several nice little (and much needed) enemas.

Next up: Why is Alberto Gonzales still employed?

Despite the inflammatory headline, this has good news in it

The headline means "Muslims are remarkably like human beings. They prefer order and custom to chaos and in-fighting." What is also notable is this:

More than 75 percent of those surveyed in the four countries – Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Indonesia – say attacks on civilians is un-Islamic. Majorities in three countries say they oppose Al Qaeda's attacks on America; in Pakistan, 68 percent declined to answer this question, rendering it difficult to gauge attitudes there.

In short, in places where Al-Quaeda doesn't have a gun to their heads, they reject al-Quaeda's methods while still desiring the basic goal of order, custom, and unity.

Also, notable is their desire for more liberty, not in other lands (so they can vote in sharia) but in their own lands (because they are ruled by tyrants). People dislike tyranny, even when their religion trains them to accept it. That's because God, not Mohammed, is the author of their souls.

They still live under the delusion that US policy aims to "undermine Islam" (would that it were so and that we had many preachers of the gospel there). But in reality, all we have is the normal cultural imperialism of Democracy Whiskey Sexy (not to mention new strides in culture such as "Zoo"). But our policy has no interest in undermining Islam.

Also, notable is the fact that Indonesian Islam appears to be a more "Episcopalian" form of Islam than you see in, say, Saudi Arabia.

But what comes through loudly is the "Don't stand so close to me" dislike of al-Quaeda from the preponderance of those polled. It's a bit like saying "Americans share with the KKK a hope for a strong and prosperous America." Well, yes. But that doesn't exactly mean Americans support the KKK. Muslims look back to the glory days of empire and live, like all peoples who have fallen from power, in the memory and hope that a Golden Age will return. So did Europeans after Rome fell. So did Israel after the destruction of the Davidic kingdom. People do that.

The key for Americans is to encourage that rift between ordinary Muslims and the nutjobs. The notion that a phenomenon as diverse as Islam is "totalitarian" (a notion constantly encouraged by our tiresome tendency to cast every aspect of this conflict in terms of World War II) is, I think, foolish. We not only can't fight a war with a billion people, we have no need to. We can, however, needlessly antagonize a billion people, and we're doing a fine job of that via our cultural imperialism. A normal, non-radicalized Muslim thinks we are just as sick as a normal Christian does. And our elites return the favor by declaring one Abrahamic Religion as good (or bad) as another. It's up to sane Christians (like Benedict for instance) to engage sane Muslims (as he has) in the attempt to find some kind of rapprochement.

God seems to enjoy playing for desperate stakes.

Will They Be a Much-Needed Blood Tranfusion or Simply the Next Wave of Immigrants to be Digested and Turned into Slaves of Hedonist Consumerism?

The World of Good Keeps Turning

"Zoo's Lyrical Reflection of Bestiality"

Depraved Chattering Class moral idiots continue their work of destruction. This is why I think it far more important to fight for the gospel than to fight for "western values" as presently conceived by our elites. True western values are essentially the truths of the Catholic faith, including its view of the human person and his relationship to the world. The "values" of the decadent west are, basically, money, sex, power, absolute personal autonomy, and idiotic pride. They are as much the enemy of love and truth as Osama bin Laden. And they are killing far more bodies and souls than he is. Another 9/11's worth will walk out of abortuaries all over the US today. Naturally, this makes me a "Christianist" because if I don't get on board with the project of making the world safe for sex with horses, I can only be indistinguishable from someone who wants to impose sharia.

Wine and Cheese Crowd Weeps Over the Tragedy of Children Not Raised by Strangers

How do you do it, Mark?

How do you digest the vast amount of info and links people send you and decide what to blog?

Well, my lad, it's all in learning when to skim and when to attend. For instance, if a link has this photo, prominently displayed:



and a caption that begins:

Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, an Episcopal Church priest and board chair for the...

Then you know article will be stupid crap and you don't have to read much of it. In this case, it is stupid crap crying out for Chris Johnson's deft treatment.

The first paragraph, if read at face value, constitutes a call for the demolition of every Catholic and Jewish medical center in the US:

A coalition of religious leaders took on the Catholic Church, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush administration on Tuesday with a plea to take religion out of health care in the United States.

Can't tell if that wording is due to the stupidity of the reporter or the "coalition". But at any rate, the following paragraphs make clear they aren't really calling for American Atheists to fill the void created by "taking religion out of health care in the United States". No, what they really mean is that they hate democracy (in the form of a law against partial birth abortion passed by Congress, signed by the President and even approved by the SCOTUS) and zealously love sticking scissors in baby's brains.

"With the April 18 Supreme Court decision banning specific abortion procedures, concerns are being raised in religious communities about the ethics of denying these services," the group said in a statement.

"They are imposing their points of view," Barbara Kavadias, director of field services for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Um, yes. Law is the imposition of a particular point of view. In the US, laws are made by legislators who are elected by the people. In Coalition-land, laws are made by enlightened despots acting through Supreme Court judges.

Anyway, my point is, this The Usual Article by the Usual Media People, about the Usual Crowd of Lefty Religionists who constitute and immensely unimportant voice in the body politic, but who are made to appear as The Viable Alternative to Religious Folk who Oppose Abortion--because the media needs them to fill that role.

Columnists Like This Love to Talk about "Why the Church is Dying"

They never seem to realize that this is exactly like a drowning man lecturing the guy on shore who is trying to throw him a rope about what a failure he is.

The Church is not dying. Europe is dying. The reason the Church is not dying is precisely because it has not opted to take the columnist's advice to become indistinguishable from The Episcopal Church. The reason Europe is dying is because it can't handle the dogmatic rigor of the Episcopal Church. It will soon be handling a lot more rigor than that from people with considerably less enlightened views that those of Benedict.

A reader writes:

Our 25 year old son is driving by himself from San Francisco to South
Carolina next week. I'm wondering if you would ask your readers if they know of
any monasteries across the country where he might (for a donation or reasonable
price) rest his head and experience the monastic life all in one.

Anyone?

The New Harry Potter Trailer is out

I love Cardinal Chaput because he shares Benedict's remarkable gift for cutting through the bull with clarity and charity

"Only one question really matters. Does God exist or not?"

That and "Ideas have consequences" are practically all you need to know to understand the 20th century and the growing insanity of the West since then.

A reader writes:

I have enjoyed reading your conversations with AEC in your blog. After reading your comment regarding St. John's gospel that "Supremely, they do not have the richness of detail we see in the passion narratives", a question came to my mind. How did St. John know of the conversations between Jesus and Pilate? I suppose there are 3 possibilities: 1) St. John was present in the Praetorium while Pilate questioned him, 2) Jesus discussed them with St. John after the resurrection and 3) St. John made them up in a similar fashion to Mel Gibson's images of Christ's home life with Our Lady in The Passion of the Christ.

Is there anything I am missing?

There is another option: Somebody (or perhaps several somebodys) reported the events to the Church afterwards. Or different apostles are witnesses to different events. It might even be possible that the evangelists made use of trial records that have long since vanished. There are any number of sources of information (including, as you say, the very real chance that John was there to see the events of the trials before Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate. Recall that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were both members of the Sanhedrin. They could be sources. They might even have been present at the interview with Pilate. These are, we must recall, *public* events, not mystical revelations in which we are being expected to put all our trust in the esoteric imaginings of one man. When the Church begins, it is already a communal phenomenon. And because it is communal the testimony to the events is, at once, common (which is why the story has the same basic outline) and individual (which is why there is different and varying detail. Everything indicates that we are looking at *memories*, not at fictional invention. To be sure, the author is convinced that the events he is remembering are pregnant with meaning (so, for example, his careful note that the soldiers did not break Jesus' legs preserves both a historical memory and his conviction that this relates Jesus to the Passover Lamb, who bones were also not to be broken.

All this points to the lameness of AEC's new objection that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. If, by that, he means that eyewitnesses tend to give varying details (and even wrong ones) about events they saw, then this is obviously true, but unremarkable. Were there two or three shots (or more) in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963? Where did they come from? How was President Kennedy dressed? Did he say he was hit as some witnesses recall or was he unable to speak as the autopsy suggests? Granted that when you spring a total surprise on a crowd of witness in a drama that lasts for seven seconds, you will get variation of detail.

But only a fool would conclude from this that there was no John F. Kennedy and that he was not murdered in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, by rifle fire to the head. There are main lines of the story on which everybody agrees. In the same way, what impresses anybody who reads the New Testament without an agenda that is bound and determined to pick apart every little detail like a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist is how the whole body of witnesses to the story of Christ are all perfectly familiar with the main lines of the story. Indeed, one does not even need the gospels to know the main lines of the story, because the epistolary evidence makes it possible to reconstruct the essential story which is the founding narrative of the community, long before the community itself gets around to writing it down.

Consider: Paul frequently quotes and alludes to historical sayings of Christ (Acts 20:35), as well as basic facts about his life, trial, death, resurrection and ascension. Paul knows Jesus is a Jew of David's line (Rm 1:3); that John the Baptist was his forerunner and had disavowed any claim to his own Messiahship (Acts 13:24-25); that his chief disciples were Peter, James and John (Gal 2:9); that he had predicted his return "like a thief" (1 Th 5:4); that he had instituted the Eucharist (1 Cor 11:23-25); that he had been rejected by the Jewish leaders (1 Th 2:15), tried under Pontius Pilate (1 Tm 5:13) and crucified for us (Gal 3:1); that he was laid in a tomb (Acts 13:29); that he had been raised from the dead and seen by many witnesses (1 Cor 15:3-8); and that he had ascended (Eph 4:9-10).

Indeed, it is worth noting that the earliest Eucharistic narrative we possess is from Paul. Yet it is, in basic form, the same thing the gospels reports, despite the fact they are written at different times, by widely dispersed authors for radically different audience of Palestinian Jews, educated Greeks, and Romans. Why? Because all four writers a quoting a liturgical source. Since Paul is writing in the early 50s, that means the memories of the community have been set in liturgical concrete very quickly after the events they commemorate (and well within the lifetime of witnesses).

Now I can well believe that witnesses would vary in details about the passion and resurrection, just as I can accept that witnesses vary in details about the death of JFK. But it would be a remarkable thing indeed if 500 witnesses swore on their lives that JFK rose from the dead and was seen multiple times by them, including an ocassion where he ate fish with them. I would be disinclined, at such a moment, to say, "Well, you were unsure if there were two shots or three at Dealey Plaza, so clearly you are incompetent to recall whether the man who head you saw blown off was speaking to you in the flesh for 40 days after you saw him die." If I was going to be a skeptic I would try a stronger argument than "Witnesses are not in mathematically perfect agreement" as my escape hatch.

This does pretty much bring us back to the "aut homo malus" argument, only with respect to the apostles, not Jesus. Either the witnesses are intellectually bad (i.e. remarkably stupid and/or mistaken), morally bad (liars) or they are telling the truth. Mass hallucination is only invoked for the special purpose of denying miracles. The notion that these guys were liars is rather difficult to maintain given that they tells stories, not only about Jesus, but especially about themselves that no liar would tell.

Permit me to indulge myself with a quote from my "By What Authority?":

Why should we trust the veracity of disciples who report Jesus of
Nazareth's words and deeds?

To begin with, let us remember also that to ask this is to ask (just as we asked of Jesus) "What sort of people were these early Christians, both apostles and the circle that surrounded them? Were they enthusiasts who just got a bit excited and mistook their rabbi for God?"

Actually if there is any impression of the disciples that most clearly stands out from the gospel accounts, it is of a group of rather obtuse people who, so far from reckless enthusiasm, are about as pedestrian as can be. Again and again, Jesus can be seen with his eyes rolling, sighing "Do you still not understand?" (Mk 8:21). This affords occasional comic relief in the gospels, as when (after feeding 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread) Jesus warns the disciples to "beware the leaven of the Pharisees and that of Herod." His disciples' insightful response? "They discussed this with one another and said, 'It is because we have no bread.'"(Mk 8:16)

Clearly we are not dealing with theological rocket scientists here. Nor do they come off as men inclined to read undue significance into things, much less read into his life an all-embracing transcendence that consummated all Scripture, all Jewish heritage, explained the deepest things of the universe and fired them with certainty that this man was the Lord of all and the Conqueror of Death. This is abundantly clear from the biblical documents which continually paint a picture of the apostles as guys who were slow on the uptake, as lummoxes who repeatedly squabbled over who was the greatest (Mk 9:33-34), and as cowards who abandoned the one they loved at the moment of his supreme crisis (Mk 14:50).

It is this stark portrayal of the disciples which also makes it difficult to believe the next alternative explanation: namely that Jesus was a sort of religious President Grant --a pious rabbi who meant well but who, with singular bad luck, managed to completely surround himself with the world's most brilliant liars and cynically opportunistic cult founders. These liars (so the theory goes) then faked the Resurrection, founded the Church, set themselves up as his oracles and God's Right Hand Men, and created the whole evil fiction of the gospel from hoodoo. They obliterated the memory of the historical Jesus and invented the alien dogmas of a deified Christ in order to control their snookered and illiterate converts.

Now our century has seen any number of liars and cult founders. Do the apostles resemble them? The movements founded by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Jim Jones and the other tyrants and con artists of this bloodiest of centuries do not portray their founders as fools and all-too-fallible sinners. Yet the churches of the apostles carefully and even dogmatically incorporated into their official literature a stark record of their apostolic founders' oafish failures -- apparently at the insistence of the apostles themselves.

To get the hang of how remarkable this is, imagine Communist Party meetings in the Soviet Union of the 1930s opening with regular readings of the cowardly deeds and stupidity of Joseph Stalin. Picture the Communist faithful urged to meditate on the ways in which Stalin and his fellow Communists misunderstood, resisted, denied and betrayed the most elementary precepts of Marx the Father and of His only Son, Lenin. Yet it appears that something very much like this recounting of the spectacular failings of the apostles was established and repeated endlessly by their very own preaching. On the apostles' own authority, a careful reiteration of their tremendous and glaring faults was endlessly kneaded into the life of the whole Church from Day One, dutifully recorded in the gospels and canonized as the very word of God by the people they converted.

This forces us to scrutinize the Apostolic Cultist theory with some skepticism. If the apostles are such cheesy hucksters why don't they act more like it? If they were ambitious con men, the gospels should read something like propaganda from the Stalin era: a tightly controlled portrayal of the apostles as Christ's Best Buddies and Tireless Servants. Instead we get embarrassing little vignettes like these:

· Jesus calling Peter the Chief Apostle "Satan." (Imagine Soviet literature in the 30s endlessly repeating a quotation in which Lenin rebukes Stalin as a "capitalist swine.") (Mk 8:33);
· Peter's squalid triple betrayal of Christ (one of them prompted by the Big Strong Fisherman's terror at the accusation of a servant girl (Mk 14:66-72)
· Thomas and his doubts (Jn 11:16; 20:24-25);
· James and John and their grab for power and glory (and the fits of jealousy this gave the other apostles) (Mk 10:35-41);
· James and John urging Jesus to call down fire on the Samaritans (Lk 9:54);
· The Twelve's squabbles on the very eve of their Master's death (Lk 22:24) and their all-too-human failure to believe or even understand the Lord they are preaching (to say nothing of their cowardly abandonment of Jesus in his hour of most desperate peril) (Mk 14:50);
· The Twelve's failure to believe the witness of the women at the tomb, amounting to their total failure to believe the promise of Resurrection which the disciples had heard from Christ's own lips (Lk 24:10-11). (By the way, a 20th century audience, imbued from birth with a deep faith in the equality of the sexes, often fails to see the significance of the women's witness to the Resurrection. A first century patriarchal audience would scarcely fail to find incredible the testimony of peasant women, at least one, Mary Magdalene, with a shady psychological profile ("out of whom he had driven seven demons") (Mk 16:9). Why would cunning liars, fabricating a Resurrection, invent female witnesses at all... unless the story actually happened that way.);
· Paul's eager participation in the murder of Stephen and persecution of the Church (Acts 7:54-60);.
· Paul's rebuke of Peter's chickenhearted capitulation to the Judaizers (Gal 2:11-16);
· Paul's fight with
Barnabas over the trustworthiness of Mark (Acts 15:36-39).
Cunning liars would also not be terribly likely to carefully preserve Mark's and Matthew's haunting record of Christ's last words: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34). Surely, men who are out to snooker superstitious slaves don't put a cry of despair on the lips of their fictitious God figure. Nor would they continually put so many words of ignorance, stupidity and betrayal on their own lips. No cult founders in any age allow themselves to be seen as human as these people do.

Yet the apostles (and, significantly, their devoted chroniclers such as Luke and Mark) never lose sight of their humanness. Indeed, they display it unaffectedly on every page of the gospels. Thus, the biblical witnesses, for all their astounding claims concerning the person of Christ, read like the words of people who act for all the world like honest, ordinary witnesses to honestly extraordinary events. Likewise, the first disciples they made (who will shortly join the apostles in persecution and death by the sword), make no effort to air brush the warts off the apostolic noses in the family album called the New Testament. Neither Luke nor Mark ever idealize the apostles as they are supposed to have idealized Christ. Indeed, they look less and less like they were even inclined to idealize him. For the gospels, so far from fiddling with the story to trim off the rough edges and deify their subject, seem to be adamant about preserving the fullness of the story even if it was difficult and embarrassing. Thus, they were astoundingly faithful in preserving, not only the scriptural witness to the failings of the apostles, but even those bits which seemed to threaten their claims of Christ's deity.

Take, for instance, the little nettlesome quotes such as "'Why do you call me good?' said Jesus, 'No one is good -- except God alone'"(Mk 10:18); "He could not do many miracles there, except lay hands on a few sick people and heal them"(Mk 6:5); "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father"(Mt 24:36); and "Who touched me?" (Lk 8:45). Such quotes appear to bear witness to Jesus' imperfection, weakness and ignorance -- not the sort of thing one wants in an idealized god figure.

Therefore the question remains. If these people were not religious maniacs, cultists, liars, fact-fudgers or general fruitcakes, what were they? How did they create from thin air (as is asserted) the fable of the God-Man Christ and get people to believe in it and in them to the point of being willing martyrs for their faith? Ultimately we must face the same question from an apostle (or one of his disciples) that we faced concerning their Master: "Who do you say I am?"

Appeals to jihadist martyrs or Joseph Smith, dying in a gun battle, are non-starters because the comparison is apples and oranges. Mohammed was his own Constantine. His goal was the frank and open acquisition of earthly power and he was well on the way toward getting it by the time he died. It's not a mystery why he was able to gather an army of conquerers around him. But it is a mystery (earthly speaking) why the apostles were willing to lead an army of outcasts and martyrs, with themselves the "scum of the earth" in the rear, as Paul described their unenviable role. One can see how Joseph Smith, as a skilled early 19th Century fabulist, could tap into the spirit of that peculiar time make name for himself with tall tales (though he never meant it to come to getting killed, which is why he energetically fired back in the gun battle that claimed his life. But what to make of men who *don't* scatter and start plea bargaining during the long decades after the death of their Master, especially when there is no indication at all that they profited by their lies (again, speaking in an earthly way)?

So I conclude that they weren't lying. Nor were they hallucinatory or delusional. An invented story would buff out all the bad looking stuff about Jesus and them. It would have Jesus come back (if he came back at all) as a ghost, not as a glorified body. It would not put in the needless business of a Jesus who was not recognized on three different ocassions. There are all sorts of easy and obvious way to make this story more convenient and obvious and less difficult. Jesus would agree with the polygamy of the Old Testament. Indeed, he would agree with the polytheism of the pagan world. If the goal is to ingratiate and sell a product, as distinct from telling what you saw and heard, there are hundreds of things about the gospel you'd never invent. Many of these things are precisely what both Mohammed and Joseph Smith rid themselves of in order to make their gospels more agreeable to the particular culture in which they find themselves. Just how agreeable the Christian gospel was to the culture in which the apostle found themselves can be discerned by reading the end of Christ's earthly ministry. It was a fate that awaited all the apostles, except John (whose brother was murdered).

Thin-Skinned Kids in Need of Insensitivity Training

School jerk puts a bag with a ham sandwich in it on a table near some Somali students to provoke them. Gets suspended and investigated for a hate crime by hysterical bureaucrats.

Placing ham where Muslim students were eating was "an awful thing," said Stephen
Wessler, executive director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence. "It's
extraordinarily hurtful and degrading" to Muslims, whose religion prohibits them
from being around ham. It's important to respond swiftly, Wessler said.

Memo to Mr. Wessler. Welcome to pluralistic America, where some of us eat ham for lunch and some kids are jerks. Placing the ham sandwich there was not "an awful thing". It was a petty thing. An irritating thing. A dumb thing. A high school thing. By your hysterical overreaction you teach the Somali students to respond to every jerk with hysterical hyper-sensitivity instead of maturity. By all means, punish the jerk student appropriately. But talking about this as though it was the Crime of the Century is silly. This is the problem with "zero tolerance" thinking. It elevates the stupid nastiness of a high school sophomore to "hate crime" status indistinguishable from murder or lynching and forces school bureaucrats to run around trying to swat flies with sledgehammers.

Rosie O'Donnell, Expert Metallurgist and Constitutional Scholar, May Seem like a Know-Nothing Fool

...but the thing is, she reflects (and shapes) the opinions of a *great many* Know Nothing fools. Surprisingly, ABC offers a nice take down of the "Catholicism Made Them Do It" explanation of the recent Supreme Court PBA ban decision.

What nobody seems to be remembering (including the wussy Dems who are condemning the decision) is that the court simply upheld a law the Congress passed, with the votes of many Dems.

The C.S. Lewis Society of California writes:

As an update, please note the following:
1. Personal Responsibility and the Virginia Tech Shootings:
With the recent tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University and the psycho-therapeutic response we are beginning to see, C.S. Lewis had a great deal to say about personal responsibility, good and evil, and criminal justice. In this regard, you may find the following article by Lewis of special interest:

"):The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," by C.S.
Lewis (from his book, GOD IN THE DOCK, edited by Walter Hooper

2. Next meetings of the C.S. Lewis Society's Bay Area Book Club:
Book for Discussion:

THE DISCARDED IMAGE: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance
LiteratureBy C.S. Lewis

"Wise, illuminating, companionable, it may well come
to be seen as Lewis's best book."--THE OBSERVER

"erudite and graceful, filled with anecdote and analogy, illuminating the images of the past."--LOS ANGELES TIMES

"his wonderful gusto, the clarity of his style, the wit of his comments and analogies, the range of his learning and the liveliness of his mind are displayed to the full, warmed by a prevailing good humor."--THE LISTENER

Meeting moderator/leader: Eric Rauscher

Wednesday, May 2nd, 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, May 16th, 7:30 p.m.
These May meetings will focus on C. S. Lewis's deeply enriching book, THE DISCARDED IMAGE, which paints a lucid picture of the medieval, Christian world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The book describes the "image" as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe," which contrasts directly with "modernist" and "post-modernist" views. This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind." The book debunks many myths including the view that the medievals thought that the earth was flat, that they thought that the universe was small, and that in their placing the earth at the center, man existed not at a position of privilege but at the margins of the universe. As Lewis notes:

"Because, as Dante was to say more clearly than anyone else, the spatial
order is the opposite of the spiritual, and the material cosmos mirrors, hence reverses, the reality, so that what is truly the rim seems to us the hub... We watch 'the spectacle of the celestial dance' from its outskirts. Our highest privilege is to imitate it in such measure as we can. The medieval Model is, if we may use the word, anthropo-peripheral. We are creatures of the Margin."

Here is a preview of the book, including the Contents and sample chapters:

The meetings will be held at:
11990 Skyline Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94619 510-482-2906

wine, soft drinks and other refreshments served

Here also are articles that discuss THE DISCARDED IMAGE:

"THE DISCARDED IMAGE," by Jim
Slagle

"THE DISCARDED IMAGE"

"THE DISCARDED IMAGE: A Book Study" by Stanley
Anderson

THE DISCARDED IMAGE is available in paperback (Cambridge University Press):

Here also is the schedule of future book club meetings:
:Here also is information on C.S. Lewis
We hope that you and others you know will be joining with us!

3. Other Upcoming Events:

Southeast Regional C.S. Lewis Conference: "Faith Set Free: C.S. Lewis and the Quest for Joy" Sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation Brentwood Academy, Brentwood, TN May 5, 2007

"Evangelicals and Roman Catholics: Christian Unity via C.S. Lewis?" Sponsored by the C. S. Lewis Society of Frederick (MD)C. Burr Artz Public Library, Frederick, MD May 21, 2007

Dorothy L. Sayers Society Annual Convention Sponsored by the Marion E. Wade Center Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL June 13-17, 2007

The 26th Annual Chesterton Conference: "The Man Who Was Today" Sponsored by the American Chesterton Society University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN June 14-16, 2007

C.S. Lewis Summer Conference: "Finding the Way: C.S. Lewis as Pilgrim Guide in an Age of Pluralism" Sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation San Diego, CA June 28-July 1, 2007

The 38th Annual Mythopoeic Conference (Mythcon XXXVIII), "Becoming Adept: The Journey to Mastery" Sponsored by the Mythopoeic SocietyUniversity of California, Berkeley, CA August 3-6, 2007

"The Crisis of the University: Freedom, Tolerance and the Pursuit of Truth" Sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation University of Colorado, Boulder, CO October 5-6, 2007

"C.S. Lewis: Man and His Work: A 21st Century Legacy" Sponsored by L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture Southeastern College at Wake Forest, Wake Forest, NC October 26-27, 2007

Why Trying to Explain History Solely in Terms of Science and Economics Doesn't Fly

Marriage is not About our Right to Endless Personal Autonomy without regard to the Common Good

...it's about the needs of children. Just so. And therefore, it is peculiarly targeted by the most narcissistic subculture of Generation Narcissus and its progeny.

The devil hates children. So much of western modernity snaps into focus if you look at it as a multi-front war on children and childhood.

Water Rights Activists Demand Consecration of Water in Holy Eucharist; Wine Activists Demand More Baptisms in Wine

Shea's Law of Women's Ordination Discussions: Anybody who approaches the question of women's ordination beginning with the word "equality" has no idea what they are talking about.

Ordination is not a civil right. It's a gift given to the Church by Jesus Christ. Jesus could have ordained women if he'd wanted to. He did not. The Church can no more change the matter of this sacrament than she can change the matter of baptism or the eucharist.

The notion that a "call" consists entirely of "I want to do X, therefore I *shall* do X" is all fine and dandy in secular career choices. It is stuff and nonsense when dealing with the sacraments. "I feel a call to consecrate my tuna fish sandwich and Snapple as the body and blood of Christ" does not mean that such a call has really been discerned. That's because a call has to be discerned in the context of the whole church and the whole of the tradition. And that Church and tradition have already made clear that it lack the authority to monkey around with the matter of the sacraments. Therefore, the "call" must be a mistake. And the mistake is not hard to find: it's based on the notion that the sacraments (especially the priesthood) are a civil right and not a gift of God distributed according to his will and not ours.

You know, Judas Iscariot was the first Catholic to receive a government grant

Margaret Sanger and Joseph Mengeles Would be So Pleased!

White embryos, good for babies; black embryos: perfect for cures!

A reader writes:

My 6 year old grandson just spent this past weekend with me. When it was story time he told me that the sun is going to kill him and he went into a crying PANIC. My daughter, his Mom, explained to me that his school taught them about "global warming" and how the sun will get hotter & hotter and will "eat up" the whole planet killing us all.

My daughter tried to explain that it won't happen for thousands of years and by that time we all will have grown old and died which only FREAKED HIM OUT even more and he started crying "I don't want to get old", "I don't want to die", and "Grandma, I don't want you to get old and die".

Finally the only thing that seemed to calm him was to tell him that Mommy & Grandma won't let anything happen to him, that we'll take care of him, we'll protect him. Even that has it problems though because he asked, "what if you're not there?"

The next day we were shopping and he saw an older woman with gray hair. He said "You're old and the sun is going to kill you". He's obviously still very confused about the whole sun and getting old thing.

My daughter did yell at the teacher for imposing this fear on her son. So far, according to the teacher, he's the only one that seems to have taken it so hard. It's just SOOOO INAPPROPRIATE for a First Grader to be taught about "global warming" in such a way as this.

Do you have any advice of what to tell him?

Grandma

It sounds like you are pretty much on the right track. What he needs most is reassurance that his world is not in grave danger and that's what you are giving him. It's hard to know what was really said in his class since his ability to digest and report the facts is, well, that of a six year old. I wouldn't assume the teacher was employing ideological scare tactics on the boy. Kids can just get notions in their heads, as his curious notions concerning aging and supernovae attest. At the same time, given the state of public education, I would not dismiss out of hand the possibility that something more like ideological indoctrination, not education, was taking place. The only way to really find out is to get to know the teacher and the curriculum. But as far as the boy himself goes, constantt reminders that he is loved, that his family loves him and will keep himself, and that, above all, God is in charge, will probably do him a world of good.

A reader writes from NYC:

I thought your readers in the NYC-metro area might be interested in this theater festival. I saw this same troupe stage an adaptation of C.S. Lewis' *The Great Divorce* earlier this year that I thought was very good (they even had me and my friends on stage for a short period of time as some of the folks waiting at the bus-stop). I can't tell if The Storm Theater is overtly Christian, but in my single experience with them they treated its themes with respect.

KAROL WOJTYLA THEATRE FESTIVAL (from the web site).

Karol Wojtyla, better known to the world as Pope John Paul II, devoted a good deal of his early manhood pursing a career in the theatre. While his chief interest was acting, he also began to write plays. They grew out of his experiences with Mieczyslaw Kotlarczk and the Rhapsodic Theatre. The group began performing clandestinely during the Nazi occupation of Poland as a way of preserving their national literature. They strove to create a uniquely Polish theatre, a "theatre of imagination, a theatre of the inner self." This striving is very much at the core of Wojtyla's plays.

These plays open a window into pivotal moments in the history of the 20th Century and explore conflicts, ideas, religious insights, and nationalistic yearnings that shaped the unique vision of a man who transformed our world forever.

The festival includes the following three plays: *God's Brother*, *The Jeweler's Shop* and *Jeremiah* and tickets are only $20.

Thanks, Nicole!

Fr. Mitch Pacwa is a good guy

I met him a few years ago in Minnesota and got to renew the acquaintance when I was down in B'ham shooting at EWTN. He lives in the "Home for Unwed Fathers" across the street from the guest house I stayed in. Very nice man. You can check out his stuff here.

Fun with Biblical Criticism

Down below, there is a discussion *and* a meta-discussion taking place which revolves around the authorshop of John. It began when I made the perfectly true observation that "the gospels are obviously written by people very close to the events. This is especially true (surprise!) of John, which has all the earmarks of an eyewitness account."

Reader AEC (=Agnostic Ex-Catholic) responded:

Even the Catholic Church accepts at least some methods of biblical criticism. Enough to concede that there is aboslutely no scholarly evidence that the Gospel of John was written by someone named John who was a direct eyewitness of the purported actvities of Jesus. At best, the authorship was likely a cast of characters, some of who knew the apostle John, but also drew on other traditions.

Mark is more fundamentalist than his own church demands on this one and I am surprised he advanced this argument.

"Absolutely no scholarly evidence?" Really? You need to learn some basic biblical criticism, AEC:

The tradition of the Church, supported by the unbroken line of patristic testimony, as well as internal evidence from the text itself is that the gospel is rooted in the testimony of the Apostle John, son of Zebedee.

St. Irenaeus, for example, is a second century Church Father who was originally from Asia Minor and who received the gospel from St. Polycarp. Polycarp, in turn, heard the gospel directly from the lips of St. John the Apostle himself. Irenaeus tells us (circa 180 A.D.) that the fourth gospel comes from the Apostle John himself, who wrote it in Ephesus. Likewise Polycrates, the bishop of Ephesus circa 190 AD, confirms that John the Apostle had lived and died at Ephesus (though some minor traditions support a location in Syria, perhaps the city of Antioch, while some have suggested other places, including Alexandria.) Numerous other witnesses in the second and third centuries corroborate the basic witness of Irenaeus and Polycrates.

In addition, elements within the gospel strongly suggest John, son of Zebedee, as the author. First, the gospel claims to rest on the eyewitness testimony of "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (cf. 13:23)-- a disciple whom no one but John corresponds to in the biblical record or in the tradition of the Church. In various ways, the gospel shows the mark of someone who was present at the events it relates, yet who stands outside the traditions related in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. That person was, quite clearly, a Jew familiar with the conditions of Palestinian Judaism at the time of Christ. Geographical details in the gospel, such as the pool of Bethesda and the pavement where the trial of Christ took place, are confirmed by modern archeological investigation. In addition, there are countless details which, if they are not the testimony of a first-hand eyewitness who was even present at the Last Supper, are an absolutely isolated occurrence of novelistic realism nineteen centuries ahead of its time. That he was part of Christ's "inner circle" of Peter, James and John (cf. Galatians 2:9) is even more likely given that he was the disciple at the Last Supper who laid his head on Christ's breast. Since the text distinguishes between Peter and the Beloved Disciple who wrote the gospel and since James was martyred long before the gospel was written (Acts 12:2), John is almost certainly the author.

Further, several bits of evidence lean toward confirming that the gospel was indeed composed at Ephesus. First, it is the traditional site of the Assumption of Mary, whom tradition says lived with John after Jesus commended her to his care (John 19:26). Second, the gospel addresses a considerable portion of material to disciples of John the Baptist who had heard only of his "baptism of repentance", but not of his full testimony to Jesus. We know from Acts 18:24 and 19:1-7 that there was some sort sect of centered in Ephesus which fit this description, to whom the apostles repeatedly addressed pleas to follow the Christ whom John the Baptist serves. Finally, the gospel's vocabulary shows an Aramaic origin of some kind, now adapted into Greek to serve the needs of a very well-educated audience of Jewish and Greek converts. His gospel assumes that his readers are familiar with the other canonical gospels and means to either detail material left untouched by them and/or expound at far greater depth the meaning of signs they record. It also assumes a great deal of familiarity with the sacramental life of the Church, as well as a high degree of familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures. This would fit the fact that the New Testament epistle with the most sophisticated exposition of theology is also associated with Ephesus: the epistle to the Ephesians. However, it also worth noting that John gives no indication that he intends his gospel only for readers in the area of Ephesus. In fact, archeological evidence indicates that the gospel spread very rapidly over the Mediterranean world. This makes sense, given that John wrote the gospel for the entire human race: all who would "believe and have life in his name" (20:31).

Other hands appear to be involved in the final editing of the gospel (cf. 21:24), but this, of course, does not negate the fact that even these other hands bear witness to the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that John is the author and that this gospel contains his first-hand, eyewitness memories of the words and works of Christ. Most scholars believe the gospel was probably edited into its present form somewhere between A.D. 90 and 100. This is based on a tradition which is not documented until the end of the third century. However, it is also worth noting that John 5:2 says that there *is* a pool near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, which was not the case after the city was reduced to a heap of rubble by the Romans after 70 AD. So it is possible that the gospel was composed before the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly in the 60s.

AEC replies:

"Really? You need to learn some basic biblical criticism, AEC"

Me ? Granted, I'm not a professional in the field. What you posted, however, is one degree of separation from the plenary verbal inspiration crowd. You appeal to "tradition" and patristic documents with the tacit assumption that these are 100% accurate, without any corroborating external textual, literary, or historical evidence to support their claims.

Just for one example, Eusebius documented that Ireneaeus might have had his Johns mixed up between multiple individuals.

If you want to verse sling, Mark 10:39 seem to imply that both James and John would suffer a martyr's death. But John 21:22-23 seem to imply that John didn't. Enough to cast some question on who actually wrote what?

"Finally, the gospel's vocabulary shows an Aramaic origin of some kind, now adapted into Greek to serve the needs of a very well-educated audience of Jewish and Greek converts. His gospel assumes that his readers are familiar with the other canonical gospels and means to either detail material left untouched by them and/or expound at far greater depth the meaning of signs they record. It also assumes a great deal of familiarity with the sacramental life of the Church, as well as a high degree of familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures."

Which you don't seem to realize is an argument AGAINST your position. John, son of Zebedee, was a fisherman, not an educated theological scholar fluent in Greek.

If you are going to adopt standards of evidence that loose, you might as well take the Muslim claims about the Koran's plenary verbal inspiration at face value as well, or Smith's claims about the golden tablets.

Which is sort of my whole point. There are plenty of book-based religions with internal claims.

Trying to figure out which, if any, might actually be true requires some sort of external arbitrating evidence.

And I reply:
Granted, I'm not a professional in the field. What you posted, however, is one degree of separation from the plenary verbal inspiration crowd.

Non sequitur. Try again. Saying the evidence points to John as the author has absolutely nothing to do with any theory of inspiration.

There is a strain of thought that John the apostle and John the revelator may be two different people. It may even be that John the revelator was part of the Ephesian community John oversaw. Hard to say. We do know, from internal evidence, that the gospel has more than one hand involved in its composition. But given the common use of an amanuensis, that shouldn't surprise us. The editors themselves are quite emphatic that they are preserving the testimony of the beloved disciple.

Mark 10:39 seem to imply that both James and John would suffer a martyr's death.

"And they said unto him, We can. And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized:"

See, this is what happens when you let all your biblical interpretation be done by people who are on a single-minded mission to show that everything in the Bible is false, untrustworthy, etc. You wind up forgetting that it's a human book using human language in your zeal to prove it's not God's book. It couldn't be possible that Jesus is simply saying that James and John are going to endure suffering for his sake, or that the loss of James to martyrdom would be a bitter cup of death for his brother John to drink. No, you have to insist that Mark thinks John was martyred, even though the whole tradition of the Church says otherwise. Then you have to insist that Mark "contradicts" John, which accords with the tradition of the Church.

Which you don't seem to realize is an argument AGAINST your position. John, son of Zebedee, was a fisherman, not an educated theological scholar fluent in Greek.

And you seem to forget that Paul was "just" a tentmaker, but still had plenty of time to be educated. You also forget that John lived in "Galilee of the Gentiles" and that the normal lingua franca of a tradesman at this crossroads of various civilizations was Greek. Finally, you make the rather snobbish error of assuming that a fisherman and a man living two thousand years ago couldn't be a genius or a contemplative--or both. It should be noted that John's gospel makes a rather curious note--and not one anybody would invent: it says that John was "known to the high priest" (i.e. the guy the author holds accountable for condemning Jesus). These are not credentials to invent, given the story that was being told. But they suggest that John may have had more of an education than you think. Given that a friend of mine was a philosophy prof till he bagged it to go work in his sick father's trucking business, I think you'd be surprised to find that not all working class folk are as ignorant, nor as stupid as you suggest. This chronological and class snobbery suggests a great deal about you, but offers us no real proof against John's authorship of the gospel--an authorship unanimously attested by the early Church and, I repeat, supported by evidence within the text.

If you are going to adopt standards of evidence that loose, you might as well take the Muslim claims about the Koran's plenary verbal inspiration at face value as well, or Smith's claims about the golden tablets.

Which is sort of my whole point. There are plenty of book-based religions with internal claims.

You mean you doubt that Mohammed wrote the Koran? I don't. The evidence that he did is very persuasive from what I've seen, as is the evidence that John wrote John.

Note that confusion under which you are laboring, AEC. You began with the confident declaration that there is, 'ow you say?, "Absolutely no scholarly evidence" that John wrote John. I informed you of the facts in the case: namely that there is lots of scholarly evidence that John wrote John. Now, instead of saying, "Ooops! I guess there is scholarly evidence that John authored the gospel of John" you have relied on the following dodges:

1. a name-calling irrelevancy accusing me of a theory of inspiration I don't hold (which, being translated, means "You are a Fundamentalist! You're stupid!")

2. an inflated misreading of a text from Mark to prove a "contradiction" that is highly dubious

3. Some chronological and class snobbery.

4. A *huge* confusion concerning whether we are discussing the human or divine authorship of the text. I see no particular reason why I should doubt the claim that Mohammed wrote the Koran, just as I see no particular reason why I should doubt that John wrote John or St. Thomas wrote the Summa. I believe such things on human evidences, not on faith. However, you are bound to try to prove that the main thing Christians believe is wrong, and so you make the very common mistake of the atheist and attempt to prove that *everything* Christians believe is wrong. That's one of the biggest weakness of atheism: it can't settle on the one reason Christianity is false and instead runs around arguing that everything about the faith is false.

The simple fact is this: You are wrong to say there is "absolutely no scholarly evidence" for John's authorship of his gospel. There's plenty of evidence and most scholars (normal ones, I mean, not those with an ax to grind) are content to say John wrote it. If you are a smart agnostic, you will abandon this particular line of objection and try to come up with some other objection, cuz that dog won't hunt. If you are even smarter, you will reflect on the possibility that the eyewitness who stands behind the gospel is, like the other evangelists, telling you what did, in fact, occur.

Face it, AEC. You're not an agnostic ex-Catholic because you figured out that "scholarly evidence" showed John did not write his gospel. It does no such thing. You are AEC for some other, probably much more personal and painful, reason. And like so many ex-Catholics, you are now layering on top of this real reason a bunch of crap "scholarship" so you can tell yourself that you are acting with cool dispassion.

Which bring us up to today's discussion. AEC is indented:

"The editors themselves are quite emphatic that they are preserving the testimony of the beloved disciple"

Well, sure. They've got a lot of sunk cost in their religion, after all. This really doesn't prove anything about the validity of the claims.

You appear to have a view of the propagation of the New Testament books that is common in a Protestant and post-Protestant culture. In this view, some unknown editors just fadged up a story out of their imaginations, attributed it to John and sent it off to random communities of Stupid People who were 2000 years dumber than us. These stupid people naturally concluded that the book must be from John and then concluded that John must be telling the truth, so they started a church based on this book. They never bothered to check up on this, but just believed what they were told. They had no connections with the community that sent them the book and never bothered to ask if anybody there knew John and could verify if his testimony really stood behind the book. And nobody from the community where John lived ever said, "Hey! John didn't write that!" Nor did John himself or anybody close to him ever protest that he'd said nothing of the kind. Fortunately, now we are 2000 years smarter and these elementary questions are at last revealed to us.

It also does not seem to occur to so many moderns that the reason the community produced the gospel in the first place is that they had been listening to the preaching of John for years and knew it backward and forward. And that this may account for the ready reception the gospel received and the unanimous testimony to its bona fidea from an early church that, so far from extreme credulity, was arch-conservatives and prone to treat purported apostolic documents with a wary eye.

"I informed you of the facts in the case: namely that there is lots of scholarly evidence that John wrote John"

You made a claim. I find the claims of "liberal" scholars and skeptics more credible, because they are backed by textual , literary, and historical analysis. The claims of conservatives are not. They are based on assumptions that are circular from the start.

No. You made a claim. You said there was "absolutely no scholarly evidence" that the gospel of John is the testimony of an eyewitness to the ministry of Christ known as the apostle John. You even made the claim that the Church acknowledges this. You were wrong. Now, instead of having the humility to say, "Okay, so there is scholarly evidence" you are now redefining "scholar" to mean "those scholars I happen to prefer" and labeling anybody who does not agree with you as a "conservative" and declaring they argue in a circle. It will come as news to the editors of the Jerome Biblical Commentary that they are "fundamentalists" or even conservatives. Yet the Jerome, editored by Raymond Brown and not generally accused of simplistic fundamentalism by sane people, is matter of fact that John's testimony is obviously behind the gospel.

Are their any circumstances of evidence under which you'd abandon your religious beliefs?

Non sequitur. I repeat: we are talking about manuscript and historical evidences concerning authorship of a document, not my belief in its inspiration. You seem not to grasp that. So, for instance, you have a notion that when I speak of "internal evidence" pointing to Johannine authorship, this is a circular argument for inspiration (ie. "This document is inspired because the author says it's inspired"). That's not what "internal evidence" refers to here. Rather, it refers to the fact that the document gives us all sorts of clues about the source of the information, some implicit and some explicit. It is clearly the work of a Jew familiar with the situation in first century Judea. He knows the city of Jerusalem as it stood before its destruction in 70 AD. He speaks Aramaic as well as Greek. He was close up to the events of the Passion as well as to numerous other details. What is more, he gives us details that nobody would make up (such as as the fact that he was known to the high priest (looks bad on the resume of the apostle, unless it happens to be true). He knows (and assumes his audience will know) the other gospel accounts. So he doesn't bother much with retelling that information. And he is, as is common in those days of epistolary relationships between communities, attested with a solid "Amen" at the end of his gospel to the town down the road. That "amen" doesn't mean "Read this and don't question whether it really came from John. Signed, a Pack of Anonymous Strangers You Must Trust" It means "You guys in the neighboring diocese down the road know John and you know us, we will vouch for the accuracy of this document."

"Given that a friend of mine was a philosophy prof till he bagged it to go work in his sick father's truckin business, I think you'd be surprised to find that not all working class folk are as ignorant, nor as stupid as you suggest"

That isn't my point.

John may have been quite bright, but he couldn't take a few classes on Greek and theology at the local university, or buy books on the topic at Borders, or surf the Net, because these things didn't exist in the era he lived in.

Actually, it is your point, because you think that John would have needed classes in Greek at a university, when he lived in Galilee of the Gentiles and could have learned, not just Aramiac and Greek but a number of other tongues as well. You also neglect to note that strange clause about John "being known to the high priest". The fact is most our picture of John comes from movies full of "humble fisherman" in ragged clothes. But it is quite possible to construct a picture of John which could leave all sorts of room for a man as well educated as the tentmaker Paul. The fact that the Jerusalem elite thought the apostles uneducated means only that the Jerusalem elite were snobs, which we knew. It's entirely possible that John had studied with rabbis. It's possible he was familiar with the work of his contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, (who has his own notions about the Logos and its relationship with the word of God). It's possible that John, after his apostleship began, got interested in the philosophy of the pagans. It's possible that he was taught by rabbis who were interested in the conversation between the Scriptures and the pagan philosophies. It's possible that John worked with a co-author, who wrote up his testimony in better Greek than John himself spoke (it should be noted that Irenaeus says John "published" his gospel). All sorts of things are possible. But certainly nothing merits the claims that there is "absolutely no scholarly evidence" that the gospel is substantially the testimony of John the apostle. The fact is there is lots of evidence. So much, that you have now shifted your ground in order to try and adduce evidence that disproves the abundance of evidence we have. The problem is that your "disproof" doesn't disprove anything.

Neither did printing presses. Most everyone was illiterate and written materials were hand copied by scribes and expensive. Only after the early church attracted some wealthy patrons would they have the resources to provide theological and language education.

Literacy among Jews was quite high. John's formative education would have been Jewish. And it is obvious from the New Testament that the authors (and their audience) expect a high degree of familiarity with the Old Testament. Recall that a thirteen year old boy was expected to read the Scriptures when bar mitzvahed.

For me, the burden is on the claimant that John wrote the Gospel to explain how he got the theological and linguistic background to pull the feat off.

That's because you have shifted your ground. You started by saying there was no evidence for John's authorship. Now, faced with the evidence you denied was there, you are trying to find counter-evidence to fight it. In short, you are looking for an excuse to believe what you want to believe, not because there is "absolutely no scholarly evidence" that John's testimony undergirds his gospel, but because there is lots of scholarly evidence, as the scholars of the Jerome Biblical Commentary point out. You comfort yourself by an argument from personal incredulity instead of taking the facts that we have and trying to fit them into what we are unsure of. The simple fact is this: if a tentmaker could be a well-educated polyglot, so could a fisherman. The evidence suggests that this is exactly what John was. At most, it suggests that John's written testimony was assisted by the work of a more polished writer, who himself insists that John is the source of what he's writing. Given that there is not a trace of doubt about this in the early church, a normal literary historian would take this as very strong evidence that this is John's testimony. Only an agenda-driven conspiracy theorist finds this too difficult to buy.

By the way, a word on the notion of gospel composition by committee: I'm a writer. I've collaborated with otheri writers on books. I know a carefully constructed document when I see one and the notion that any of the gospels, much less the gospel of John, is a bunch of fragments of stories, invented and strung together by an anonymous committee who somehow got everybody to believe these strange tales just by including a "trust us" coda at the end of the work is crazy and incredible beyond telling. John is a very carefully architected work (as is Matthew). Carefully architected works like this may involved the work of several hands, but there is always a superintending author at work.

"... offers us no real proof against John's authorship of the gospel--an authorship unanimously attested by the early Church and, I repeat, supported by evidence within the text"

You don't get it. That the Church and the text make claims does not justify the validity of the claims. That's a circular argument.

No. You don't get it. We aren't talking about the validity of John's claims. John's *claims* are not about whether the document is from him, but about whether Jesus Christ is the son of God risen from the dead. John does not claim, like Mohammed or Joseph Smith, that the document you are reading wasn't written by him, but by God. He, or rather his editor, is matter of fact that the source of the document is a human being: the beloved disciple (aka John). The community that received the document is not 2000 years stupider than you are. They are perfectly able to ask "Did John really write this?" and to veryify "Yes he did". How do they verify this? Not because "Rome said so" but because the document was propagated by the community that knew John and could attest to the accuracy of the testimony in it. That's why the document propagated so quickly and was so quickly accepted. It's why other documents that also had the names of apostles attached to them did *not* propagate quickly and were *not* accepted, because ancient weren't stupid enough to accept apostolic authorship just because the document claimed apostolic authorship. (By the way, haven't you ever wondered why gospels written by figures of no importance in the rest of the New Testament, such as Mark and Luke, were accepted? If you are going to cook up a gospel, why attribute it to such second stringers? Answer: the gospels weren't cooked up. They are the works of the people to whom they are attributed.)

Appeals to the Church's tradition are not appeals to Rome or to some authoritarian figure. They are appeals to the memory of various communities. Saying "It's inspired because it says it's inspired" is a circular argument. Saying, "Both the internal evidence and the testimony of the people to whom it was written both point strongly to the authorship of John" is not a circular argument, unless you also want to say, "The only reason we think Caesar wrote the Gallic Wars is because an anonyous committee of authors attributed it to him and the whole Roman Empire engaged in a vast conspiracy to cover this up or were too stupid to question it." You may prefer this way of handling evidence, but real scholars will generally disagree with you.

"You mean you doubt that Mohammed wrote the Koran? I don't. "

Maybe he did. Yet you obviously don't find the claims of the Koran compelling enough to convert to Islam. Why ? Becasue they conflict with Christian claims?

In examining Chrsitian and Islamic claims, obviously they can't both be right. I reject both, because in each case their is insufficient external corroborating evidence. Without that, both sets of claims fail on circularity.

Note again that you are confused. You can't seem to break loose of the confusion between claims of authorship and claims of inspiration. We are dealing exclusively with claims of authorship here. The evidence is very strong that John wrote his gospel. Even the highly regarded scholars of the Jerome Biblical Commentary will tell you that (and they are no fundies). Sensing, at some level, that this is so, you are now trying to wriggle away by changing the subject. Before you wriggle away entirely, I would appreciate it if you could either acknowledge that you had no idea what you were talking about when you declared there was "absolutely no scholarly evidence" that John preserves the testimony of the Apostle John. Failing that, at the very least, amend your statement to say "None of the scholars who confirm my pre-existing prejudices think John wrote John and I'm not interested in anything besides scholarship that tells me what I want to hear."

"You are AEC for some other, probably much more personal and painful, reason. "

Always, Christians have this tendency to psychoanalyze people who don't buy their religion's claims. It's realy quite sad. You realize you lose the argument on evidence, then resort to this mild form of ad hominem.

Sorry. That dog won't hunt, to appropriate your phrase. I find the evidence for Christianity far less persuasive than the evidence against it, therefore, I reject it. That's it.

Um, no. You don't. The reason for this you yourself have just shown. For you are clearly looking to "scholarship" that re-confirms a choice you are making on some other, un-named, basis. I find this phenomenon to occur very often, especially with ex-Catholics. They leave the faith for some (usually highly personal) reason and then only later get around to layering any and every excuse on top of their decision. The diagnostic clue is usually that they will accept almost *anything* as the "reason" for their departure. And as the effort to justify their decision increases, they pile on more and "reasons", in the teeth of all arguments. The credulity of the ex-Catholic can be astounding. Whether its the insta-willingness to buy the conclusions of some crap scholar about the Da Vinci Code, or the announcement that "I realized to my horror that Jesus said "Call no man Father" and so the Church is clearly the whore of Babylon" or, in your case, the losing battle of "There's absolutely no scholarly evidence for John's authorship and even *real* Catholic biblical scholars acknowledge this... well, no scholar *I* like.... well, okay there's evidence but *I* don't understand how John could be educated... well, okay, even the Jerome commentators take it for granted that John wrote John....well, let not talk about authorship, let's talk about inspiration".

My point is this: The project of trying to disprove the Catholic faith leads many ex-Catholics in to the blunder of being unable to acknowledge any good whatever about the Church. If it's Catholic, it's wrong. The problems is, even with truly wicked things, there's usually something good you can say. But not a few ex-Catholics get so engaged in the project of "disproving" the faith that they can't confine themselves to sins or lies of Catholics. They have to, by the nature of the project, attack virtues and truths as well. And so, they invariably wind up saying nonsense and then trying to defend the nonsense.

And as far as "crap scholarship" is concerned, pot, kettle, black to your religion (not personally).

Far too many Christians lie continually, with apparent gusto and verve, about the scientifc facts when trying to justify their abortion or stem cell research positions (which I am not debating at this time).

The stamements like "abortion causes breast cancer" and "adult stem cells are just as good" are not supported by the scientific facts. They are intellectually dishonest.

I have little respect for any belief system that claims to be the quintessence of virtue but at the same time engages in knowing intellectual dishonesty.

I'd have far more respect for them if they admitted their is no scientific basis for their beliefs, and their grounds for opposition are strictly religious.

I might even listen if they could make a secular moral argument.

Pot, kettle, black indeed. What all that about abortion and breast cancer has to do with the question of who wrote John I have no idea, but I suppose it's a consoling distraction when you don't want to face the fact that you made a baseless claim and have been fighting a losing battle to back it up. Meanwhile, back in the world of ordinary biblical research (a world that includes not just Catholics or even believers, but atheists who are actual scholars and not cranks with an ax to grind), the normative understanding is the the evidence strongly supports Johannine authorship of John. When you've really digested that fact, not of faith, but of textual analysis and historiography, you will be in a better position to carry on the discussion.

The first thing you should consider, when you do so, is this: If you *really* are an ex-Catholic because "I find the evidence for Christianity far less persuasive than the evidence against it", then you will cooly and dispassionately take this new evidence into account. If, however, you fail to acknowledge this evidence and simply go on maintaining the falsehood that there is "absolutely no scholarly evidence" for Johannine authorship (by which you mean "There is scholarly evidence, but I'm still looking for excuses to ignore it), then you will indeed demonstrate that you are not moved by the question of Johannine authorship questions but that you merely find the alleged disproof of Johanninine authorship one of a number convenient excuses for a choice made on other grounds you have not revealed. It is, ultimately, those other--real--grounds for you rejection of the faith that you will have to deal with sooner or later.

My prayer--and it is a sincere one--is that you will find the grace to do that. Because God still loves you and Christ is still seeking you.

I think I may go back to referring to Gay Brownshirts

Thomas More Law Center News Alert Mon, Apr 23, 2007

Federal Judge: Catholic Church's Position Against Homosexual Adoptions Justifies Government Hostility Towards Church
ANN ARBOR, MI - In its brief filed last week with the U. S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Thomas More Law Center urged the court to reverse a federal judge's ruling that an anti-Catholic resolution of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was constitutionally justified because the Church opposed adoptions by homosexual couples. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, a President Carter appointee and one-time counsel for the National Organization for Women (NOW), ruled that the Board resolution condemning Catholic moral teaching on homosexuality and urging the Archbishop of San Francisco and Catholic Charities of San Francisco to defy Church directives does not violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The Thomas More Law Center, a national Christian legal advocacy group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is appealing the ruling on behalf of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and two Catholic residents of San Francisco.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Law Center, observed, "Judge Patel clearly exhibited hostility toward the Catholic Church. During oral argument and in her written decision she claimed that the Church 'provoked the debate' by publicly expressing its moral teaching, and that by passing the resolution the City responded 'responsibly' to all of the 'terrible' things the Church was saying. This judge attempted to rationalize the evocative rhetoric and venom of the resolution which are sad reminders of Catholic baiting by the Ku Klux Klan."

Just one week after the anti-Catholic resolution, the San Francisco Board voted-again unanimously-to condemn some 25,000 Evangelical teens who gathered in the city to express their opposition to homosexual conduct. Openly gay San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno said the teenage group is "obnoxious" and "disgusting" and should not be tolerated. He told the Christian group to "get out of San Francisco."

Thompson remarked, "The policy of San Francisco is one of totalitarian intolerance of Christians of all denominations who oppose homosexual conduct. My concern is that if the judge's ruling is allowed to stand, it will further embolden the San Francisco Board in its anti-Christian attacks."

The anti-Catholic resolution, adopted March 21, 2006, alludes to the Vatican as a "foreign country" meddling in the affairs of the City and describes the Church's moral teaching and beliefs as "insulting to all San Franciscans," "hateful," "insulting and callous," "defamatory," "absolutely unacceptable," "insensitive[] and ignoran[t]." The resolution calls on the local Archbishop to "defy" the Church's teachings and describes Cardinal William Joseph Levada, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible for safeguarding the doctrine on the faith and morals of the Church throughout the Catholic world, as "unqualified" to lead.

Robert Muise, the Thomas More Law Center attorney handling this matter, observed, "Our constitution plainly forbids hostility toward any religion, including the Catholic faith. In total disregard for the Constitution, homosexual activists in positions of authority in San Francisco have abused their authority as government officials and misused the instruments of government to attack the Catholic Church. Their egregious abuse of power now has the backing of a federal judge."

Catholic doctrine proclaims that allowing children to be adopted by homosexuals would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. According to Church authority, such policies are gravely immoral and Catholic organizations must not place children for adoption in homosexual households. Accordingly, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has directed Catholic organizations to adhere to the Church's moral teaching.

The Law Center's lawsuit claimed that the City's anti-Catholic resolution violated the First Amendment, which "forbids an official purpose to disapprove of a particular religion, religious beliefs, or of religion in general." The Law Center argued that the "anti-Catholic resolution sends a clear message to Plaintiffs and others who are faithful adherents to the Catholic faith that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community and an accompanying message that those who oppose Catholic religious beliefs, particularly with regard to homosexual unions and adoptions by homosexual partners, are insiders, favored members of the political community."

In her written opinion upholding the resolution against the Law Center's constitutional challenge, the federal judge defended the City by essentially claiming that the Church invited the attack by publicly expressing its teaching on moral issues. The judge stated, "The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith provoked this debate, indeed may have invited entanglement, by its [doctrinal] statement. This court does not find that our case law requires political bodies to remain silent in the face of this provocation."

Thompson commented, "Even more remarkable was the judge's questioning during oral argument. When Mr. Muise explained to the judge that the constitution is a restriction on government because the government has the power of the law to coerce behavior, the judge responded coldly, 'You saying, the power to condemn someone to Hell isn't more important to some people than being condemned by the state to have to pay a fine or go to jail?' Mr. Muise, who was stunned by this comment, responded by explaining that the Church doesn't condemn anyone to Hell, only God has that authority. To which the judge wryly stated, 'I'm glad to hear that.'"

The Thomas More Law Center defends and promotes the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life through education, litigation, and related activities. It does not charge for its services. The Law Center is supported by contributions from individuals, corporations and foundations, and is recognized by the IRS as a section 501(c)(3) organization. You may reach the Thomas More Law Center at (734) 827-2001 or visit our website at www.thomasmore.org.

Lefty Filmmakers Make Tentative Attempt to Break Away Tribal Politics

It's a baby step, but it's something. I especially enjoy that they are honest enough to both expose Michael Moore's frauds and not allow themselves to be co-opted by the Agenda Machine at FoxNews. I don't agree with their politics, but I commend their honesty.

Your Weekly Pavel Poetry!

Speaking of Pavel Chichikov, I owe him a big debt. He put me on to the best fiction read I've had in years: Eifelheim.

It's the story of a German priest living in a little village in the Black Forest in 1348-49 (the eve of the Black Death). The priest (and eventually, many (though not all) of the villagers) befriend a group of aliens whose craft has crashed in woods nearby.

There is also a secondary plot in which we trace the odd ways in which three different disciplines inform each other in order for moderns to discover and reconstruct the astonishing (and tragic) story that unfolded in the wake of the encounter between the villagers and the Krenken.

If you are looking for some tedious bit of postmodern agitprop about dumb religious medievals waving torches, this is not your book. What most deeply impressed me was the obvious care with which Michael Flynn, the author, has recreated the period and the deep respect he has for his well-educated and devout priest. Better still, he does not fall into the Gene Roddenberry trap of heads we lose, tails they win Alien Moral Superiority.

If you don't know what I mean, simply reflect back on how often we are reminded what moral dwarfs human are in Star Trek, and yet how frequently alien races get to treat us like experimental hamsters and then render a verdict on how "primitive" we are after they have used and discarded us. The Krenken are technologically far superior to the medieval Germans. But the priest holds his own in philosophical discussions with the Krenken, who are, by turns, choleric, curious, fearful, astounded, and just as capable of bafflement over the Big Questions as we are. Some of them seek baptism. They have a social order that is, in some ways, agreeable to the medieval mind and in some ways, utterly repugnant to it. Some are fascinated with the notion of the Incarnation.

I don't do the book justice by half. After so many utterly tiresome attempts to force the Medievals into our categories and/or condescend to them (Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Kingdom of Heaven, The Advocate, etc) it's really refreshing to read a piece of fiction where the period is treated with respect on it's own terms. It's also fun to read about the joy of discovery as the modern heroes piece the clues together and discover that it's not merely *what* you see, but *how*, that makes the data come together.

If you like science fiction at all, do check it out. A fine, fine book.

Incurious Bigoted Materialist Dogmatist...

...writes column defending previous expression of incurious bigoted materialist dogmatism.

In other news, scientists isolate genes for ignorance and arrogance--located on the same chromosome! No wonder they are always together.

I'm getting suggestions for titles for my Mary book

I'm looking at something that will attract as many niche markets as possible. My current favorite is "A Million Little Pieces of the Secret of Mary Potter and the Purpose-Driven Code of Jabez".

May God Bless This Heroic Mother Throughout All Eternity

Eternal Light shine upon her, Father, through our Lord Jesus!

Champions of Faith

My very enthused about his Faith boss, Tom Allen, recently undertook a new project that looks pretty good. It's a show called "Champions of Faith" in which John Morales interviews a whole bunch of Catholic ball players about the impact the Faith has had on their lives. I had the privilege of going over the transcripts of the interviews in preparation for a book that will be coming out later, and I found it interesting to see how the zen of baseball and the teaching of the faith interact in theses guys hearts and minds.

Here's a couple of You Tubes that introduce you to the show:





If a guy like me, who totally lacks the gene for interest in sports, can find it interesting and moving, it's gotta be good!

Reader Kathleen Lundquist writes:

Just a note to let you know that my newest release, Mystagogia ­ the EP, is available now for your listening (and purchasing) pleasure at CD Baby(www.cdbaby.com). Follow this link: http://cdbaby.com/cd/klundquist2

This is a 5-song custom CD-R recording, a little taste of what I've been doing in coffeehouses and other small venues around the Northwest in the last year. There's lots of information there on the webpage, including a link to my previously released album Light in Our Darkness and to my website (www.mystagogia.net).

What's more, the Mystagogia EP is on CD Baby's $5 Specials program, which means that if you buy 2 or more (different) CD Baby albums from this "bin",they're only $5 apiece. (The regular price for the EP is $6.50.) Such a deal! And, quantity discounts are our middle name!

So, check it out! Let me know what you think, too. And if there's a coffeeshop or other small venue near you that does live music and you think they'd like me, send me their contact info and I'll send my press kit out to them. I'm currently booking for June onward.

Thanks so much, and have a lovely Spring day!

A reader writes:

On April 24, the legislative assembly for Mexico City hopes to legalize abortion in one of the largest cities in the world.

You see, legislators from Mexico’s leftist parties expect to use the legalization of abortion in their nation’s capital as a springboard to permit the brutal practice throughout the entire country.

To sign your instant petition, click here.

Despite the fact that most Mexicans are Catholic and oppose abortion, pro-abortion lawmakers and their allies are hard at work not only to legalize abortion, but to force the state to pay for abortions at state run health clinics.

Mexico City is the site of the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the anti-abortion cause. Now is time to make your pro-life voice heard.

Yes, the fight against abortion has no borders. With one click, you can add your voice to this massive petition by sending a personal, respectful email simultaneously to each of the 64 legislators of the Mexico City Legislative Assembly.

Click here to sign your petition!

Thank you for helping me launch this massive petition, because if abortion continues destroying the family on which the future of society depends, and morality is not boldly defended, civilization will soon disintegrate.

You and I cannot remain indifferent.

Thank you so much and God bless you!

Very Classy

Despite a personal e-mail from commissioner Roger Goodell, Thomas rejected the NFL's repeated written and verbal invitations to attend the draft-week festivities in New York. Thomas wants to maintain a years-old tradition in which he spends draft day fishing for coho salmon on Lake Michigan with his dad.

Jeremiah: Peacenik, Collaborationist, Wet Blanket, Israel Hater, Carping Media Critic of the Government, Theocrat, Unpatriotic Conservative, Damn Liberal Progressive, Practitioner of Hate Speech, Religous Zealot, Intolerant Anti-Pluralist

There's a hardly a label in our current political lectionary you couldn't stick on him. Only, the thing is: he was right.

There are two basic morals 21st Century people can draw from this: the stupid one and the wise one.

The stupid one is, "So the Bible is garbage after all. Turns out Jeremiah was a jerk."

The wise oen is, "Perhaps there's something radically insane about our current political categories."

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts. - Isaiah 55:8-9

Many Many Thanks to the Generous Readers Who are Praying and Supporting Jerry and Barbara

For those not up to date on these people and their desperate plight, go here. Barb wrote me back over the weekend to send along their address and I have forwarded it to the many kind and beautiful folk who asked for it. They can still use more prayers and your financial assistance if you can help out. Write me if you want their address and you can send them a check directly. Please don't send me money via PayPal and ask me to forward it. I don't want to be a middle man for several reasons, not least of which is that when you donate via PayPal, some of the money that Jerry and Barb need does to PayPal.

Thanks again for your beautiful goodness to a family in need! You make me so proud!

In honor of St. George's Day

The Englishman

St. George he was for England.
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
For though he fast right readily
In hair-shirt or in mail.
It isn't safe to give him cakes
Unless you give him ale.

St George he was for England,
And right gallantly set free
The lady left for dragon's meat
And tied up to a tree;
But since he stood for England
And knew what England means,
Unless you give him bacon
You mustn't give him beans.

St George he is for England,
And shall wear the shield he wore
When we go out in armour
With the battle-cross before.
But though he is jolly company
And very pleased to dine,
It isn't safe to give him nuts
Unless you give him wine.

- G.K. Chesterton

O Frabjous Day! Calloo! Callay!

The Long Awaited Day is Here!

Just got word from Catholic Answers:

My Mary book has been accepted for publication!!!!

Wheeee!!!!!

Actually, I should call it my Mary books because...

Bum ba BUM!

We have agreed to break the book into a trilogy. No word on the details of how that will be done precisely, but the manuscript does lend itself to that pretty easily since the first book primarily deals with the approach to Mary (i.e., where Catholics get all this stuff about her and how they read their Bibles in light of Tradition), the second book deals with the four Marian dogmas (Theotokos, Perpetual Virginity, and Immaculate Conception and Assumption) and the third book looks at what Catholics may (as distinct from "must") believe about Mary.

The first book will be out in about a year. I'm not sure of the title (since, by a strange coincidence Tim Staples also submitted a book called "Behold your Mother" almost exactly the same time I did.

Anyway, thanks for your continued prayers for this project! I'm very excited for it to finally see the light of day because I think it answers a need that no other book out there quite addresses. It's the book I wished somebody had written when I was trying to understand the whole Mary thing in the Catholic Church.

Hooray! Yippee! Wahoo!!!! Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus! And thanks Mamma Mary!

PS. Thanks be to God for Heather Price, who sagely reminds excited me of my capitalist duty to remind you that when the day comes for pre-orders (sorry no clue what the price will be yet) you will of course want to pre-order from me, not Amazon or any other middle man. That way, I get all the dough, my kids get food on the table, and you get a signed copy.

Alberto Gonzales: Incompetent. Liar. Spectacularly Inept. One must read it to believe it

But he does rubber stamp whatever the Prez wants, so naturally we get this:

President Bush was “pleased” with Gonzales’s performance and has “full confidence” in the attorney general.

Heck of a job, Gonzo.

There's much discussion around the web these days about the "failure of heroism" at VT

John Derbyshire seems to sum up the opinion of a number of people with his complaint that the victims and survivors at VT should have rushed the gunman. He wants to know if the heroes of Flight 93 didn't teach us anything.

Yes. They taught me that John Derbyshire believes the pagan error of stoicism, which Pascal nicely sums up as "believing you can do always what you can do sometimes." It is an error not very far away from the far graver error of Pelagianism: the belief that you can save yourself by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and being a saint, dammit!

The heroes of Flight 93 are remembered because they did something exceptional and rare, not because they typified the human condition. They represent not the normal level of American Can-Do Courage from which our civilization has sadly fallen, but an extraordinary act of heroism which has been extraordinary throughout human history. And they had some distinct advantages over the people at VT. For the heroes of Flight 93 were people in a unique circumstance: they had time to reflect, to realize the full import of their situation, to realize not one of them could get out of their situation, to coordinate with others, to gather themselves emotionally and mentally, and to formulate a desperate plan. Also, they were up against men with box cutters who were distracted with trying to fly a big airplane.

The people at VT has none of these advantages. Death burst in the door and started shooting. The normal reaction of the human organism to extreme situations is blank disbelief and inaction. That's why Jews cooperatively lined up and walked into the gas chambers. Wanna know why there is a Zapruder film of JFK's assassination? Because Zapruder just kept on filming. He didn't immediately drop the camera and spring into action, seeking to trace the source of the shots and organize a posse to track down the murderer. He thought JFK was joking when he grabbed his throat after the first shot hit him. People don't really shoot the President. So he stood immobile and just kept filming.

A few years ago two jets collided and crashed at an air show in Stuttgart, killing several people on the ground. We have excellent videos of this because, not just the cameraman, but most of the crowd stood stock still as the fireball engulfed its victims. Why? Because planes don't crash and kill people right in front of you. You don't move. You don't know what to do in this utterly unique situation. Nothing in your life prepared you for it.

It's moments like this I especially prize the revelation for its mercy. I honor and revere the heroes of Flight 93. But I don't hold the victims and survivors of Virginia Tech to that standard and I think it cruel to burden the survivors with all this "Where are the Real Men?" guilt for their entirely normal and human actions in a crisis. St. Paul himself tells us that acts of heroic self-sacrifice are not the norm and never have been when he notes of Christ's self-sacrifice, "For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commends his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8).

Likewise, if there's anything that scripture pounds into our heads concerning huge promises of courage and deliberate action in crisis situations, it's the story of Peter at cock crow. In a moment of extreme pain and shame, Derbyshire, from the comfort of his cubicle, uses the power of his pen to suggest that *he* would not have failed. Oh sure, he qualifies it with "I should hope I would have had the courage..." blather. But the point is that he chooses a moment when survivors are reeling with shock and shame to make sure they feel fully wracked with guilt. Classy.

The Church began with words "Though everyone else deny you, I will never deny you," ringing in its ears. Derbyshire's brave words, boldly punched into a laptop, are cheap indeed. He'd be better employed cleaning the victims and survivor's boots with his tongue than using it to berate them in their agonies. What survivors need far more than the scolding of a pagan Stoic is the mercy of the Christ who forgave Peter's lapse and gave him a chance to cooperate with grace in his redemption.

Some will complain that this makes weakness, cowardice and sin the normal position of the human race. It most certainly does. Didn't you learn anything when they taught about original sin in Sunday school? That's why we need a Savior--a merciful one.

PS. On a related note, I pray God that some faithful servant of Christ will go to these poor heartbroken people with a word of mercy and love. They, more than anybody, break my heart with their anguish. Surely they must break the heart of God too. Hear their cry, O Lord! Stretch out your arm and save them from the depths.

Two Phases of History: The Meme Spreads!

Reason to Homeschool #394853475953843945529438539483453598374539456834

State-sponsored child abuse. That's what our kids need!

As I Say...

The democratic capitalist system seems to work the best at fixing problems in the environment. That's because subsidiarity is common sense and it's better to have individuals close to the problem undertake local initiatives than for a centralized colossus like the old Soviet Union bollix everything up.

Another VT Hero

He sounds like an amazing guy. God rest his soul.

Peg Noonan is Her Typically Sensible Self

I miss the time when America had grownups in its elites. I miss even more the time when we could be shocked by evil.

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdst
But in his motion like an angel sings

"In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Iluvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him. In this Music the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and... Iluvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was called Eä."

Everything in creation points to the Creator. But some things are particularly blatant.

Lefty Bigots Demonstrate Once Again What the Left Stands For



This pretty much sums up why those lame attempts by the Dems to pretend they respect Christians always look like Nixon trying to disco.

By the way, the death toll from rioting Catholics regarding this insulting cartoon currently stands at zero and is doubling hourly.

My Awesome Children

Peter (11) asks: What do you get when you cross a mouse with a dog?

A: A vermin shepherd!

(He made that up. I'm so proud!)

Meanwhile, the Beloved Cow somehow channels the spirits of Dr. Seuss and Ogden Nash on his blog.

The kid needs a spell-checker, but on the whole I'm mighty impressed.

Hey Western Washington! Listen Up!

Central Deanery of Seattle ACCW (Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women) is pleased to present for ALL Men, Women & Youth:

Patrick Madrid
Saturday, April 28, 2007
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

St. Philomena Parish
1790 South 222nd Street, Des Moines
Patrick will give the following talks followed by Q&A:

“Search & Rescue: How to Bring Your Family and Friends into (or Back Into) the Catholic Church”

“Pope Fiction: Answers to Myths and Misconceptions about the Papacy”

“Ten Mistakes Catholics Make When Sharing the Faith”

“Why Be Catholic When You Can Be Anything Else?”

Central Deanery, ACCW will tithe 10% of the proceeds from this event to the Seminarian Aid Fund.

Questions? Visit us on the web: www.seattleaccw.org

For more information about Patrick and his ministry, visit his website.

Don't miss it if you can!

Palestinian Christians Get it In the Neck from Palestinian Muslims Too

Not a problem though. They're just Christians, so they probably had it coming.

It Just Gets Better and Better

Anthony Kennedy, the mystic of the Supreme Court, documents in graphic detail the horrors of a partial birth abortion. In this, he shows himself superior to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other shrill dissenting opinions in his willingness to actually, like, mention what is done to the child.

However, we have to bear in mind that, all the while he is doing this, he is basically telegraphing his willingness to support such horrors in future decisions. When you believe that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of life" such a willingness is more or less inevitable. And it is why your name will figure quite prominently on the tombstone of post-Christian civilization. For it spells the death of the classical and Christian conception of freedom, which is the liberty to do what is virtuous, not to do whatever the hell you want with no regard for the common good.

I would be remiss if I did not note the following disturbing point as well:

Contrast Kennedy's majority opinion with the short, concise concurring opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas (Justice Scalia concurring). While joining the Supreme Court's opinion "because it accurately applies current jurisprudence," Thomas hastens "to reiterate my view that the Court's abortion jurisprudence [citations omitted] has no basis in the Constitution." Period. End of story. Unfortunately, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito were no-shows on this concurring opinion.

It's little things like this that make me want to hold off breaking out the Wheat Thins and Cheez Whiz for the Bush is Great, Bush is Good Victory Celebration. I'm glad they concurred. But why do they refrain from noting the bleedin' obvious: that the courts' abortion jurisprudence from Roe on down has no basis in the Constitution?

Update: Steve "Feddie" Dillard of the late lamented Southern Appeal blog writes me:

Don't get too down on Roberts and Alito. Both men are judicial incrementalists. While I too would have liked to see both men join Thomas's concurrence, they probably chose not to in order to keep Kennedy on board, and so as not to signal their intentions in a future case. I am quite confident that both men will chip further away at Roe in the future when such opportunities present themselves. Just be patient. Roe is dead precedent walking. It is only a matter of time before Roe joins Dred Scott in the dustbin of history as one of the most abominable judicial decisions ever.

Fair enough. My hope was that there would be a reasonable explanation and this seems like one. It's just that once you been Blackmunned, Souterized, Kennedied and O'Connored, you half expect a GOP nominee to stab you in the back when the chips are down.

When Excuses are Made for the Helplessness of Reagan Because of the Borking of Bork and the Subsequent Appointment of the Disastrous Anthony Kennedy...

I always want to know why Clinton was not made to be equally helpless in the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Update: Never mind. I'm all wet here. I could have sworn that Ginsburg and Breyer were confirmed after the Republican Revolution in 94. But my memory is wrong. Both were confirmed before that. So they aren't the fault of a careless GOP. My Bad.

Archbishop of San Francisco Undergoes Spinectomy

On Nancy Pelosi: “…We haven’t had an opportunity to talk about the life issues. I would very much welcome that opportunity, but I don’t believe that I am in a position to say what I understand her stand to be…”

I hope the good archbishop does one day penetrate the unfathomable mystery of Nancy Pelosi's views on abortion. One hint may lie in the fact that she supports sticking scissors in a baby's skull. And if you don't, she declares you and "extremist".

That's probably enough to start the conversation, if you are really interested, Archbishop.

My Goodness! Republican Haters Turn Up in the Unlikeliest Places

Here's GOP-hater Diogenes commenting on GOP-hater Mark Levin of NRO, who wrote:

The fact is that Anthony Kennedy makes clear that he is open to a case where the litigant asserts a health exception to partial-birth abortion. He makes this clear in several ways, including distinguishing between a "facial" vs. "as-applied" challenge, and all but invites such a challenge. That is, he is soliciting a health-exception challenge. Kennedy also telegraphs how he'll vote -- with the other four activists. In short, he says the federal statute, which excepts partial-birth abortion in cases that threaten the life of the mother (thereby narrowing the health exception), is consistent with past court rulings, but he is prepared to reverse course in a future case involving non-life threatening health exceptions. Maybe today's decision will temporarily chill doctors from performing partial-birth abortions. But the emphasis here is on word "temporary."

That's because Republican appointee Kennedy has pretty much delivered what you'd expect the appointee of The Party That Doesn't Much Care to deliver.

Now the odd thing is that when Diogenes and Levin say, "Don't get too excited. In the grand scheme of this is, to be sure, a victory, but not *much* of a victory" you hear crickets. When I say the same thing, everybody starts yelling at me for "hating" the GOP. Weird.

Meanwhile, in other news, the Great Pretend Dem Leadership Harrumph was heard, setting new records for collective hypocrisy. You see, the Dems are protesting a SCOTUS decision that upholds a law many of them voted for. The fact that not all of them voted for it simply shows the depth of depravity of the Evil Party, but the fact that some did and are now posing before the cameras for The Base to protest this erosion of our right to stick scissors in a baby's skull just shows that there is no evil to which you cannot alloy cowardice and hypocrisy.

The one glimmer of light in all this, with respect to the Dems, is that their leadership is fortunately more timid than the flesh-eaters who constitute the DU and Daily Kos base. Hopefully, that timidity will quell the power of the True Believers to work too much mischief with their own dreams of a secular messianic paradise of cannibalism and a Nanny State.

Jerry and Barbara Update

The update is that there is no update, which worries me a bit. I wrote Barb to ask for her snail mail address and have received no reply. I also wrote her sister. Nothing so far.

As soon as I hear from one of them, I will send the info along to the many wonderful people who have written me volunteering to support them (go here if you want to know what I'm talking about).

Please don't Paypal me or send me any money. Write me and as soon as I have their snail mail address, I will give it to you and you can send them a check directly.

Again, thanks for your wonderful generosity to a family in need!