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August 2006

Punditry

150th anniversary. Will there be a 200th?

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

A reader sent me a link to a 14 minute video of the 150th anniversary of the Erie Benedictines. Watching it makes me doubtful that they will have a 200th anniversary much less a 175th. The video even includes liturgical abuses such as glass chalices and performance art liturgies. A video in which the Catholic Church or Jesus are never mentioned. Just the typical talk of Zen meditations and Sr. Joan Chittister talking about how for the first time warfare now kills more civilians than military personnel (obviously not a WWII scholar). Their vibrancy in growth was talking about a 27 year old who had joined the order and and a 40 and 62 years olds who became lay members. One of the worlds easiest job is being a Novice Master for the Erie Benedictines. You can go years without having to anything to do at all.

What struck me most about this video is that they were nothing more than a community of social workers. They do good work for the poor and for others, but it seems divorced from the Gospel. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta disliked the term social worker and had said ‘We are not doing social work; this is God’s work.’ I don’t think the Erie Benedictines would have a problem with the term at all. By the video you would think that it was a promotional video for a retirement home. Old folks home or Benedictine Sisters would make for a difficult test for the outside observer. Another interesting thing I noticed that every single cross displayed in the video was a Christ-less cross. No crucifixes at all. Maybe this is truth in advertising since they have become a Christ-less community.

Can communities such as these be reformed or will they just die out? It seems to me that in the history of the Church that most reform happens from breaking off when an order has become lax and lost its focus on Christ. The Benedictines will live on but these branches will become footnotes in the history of the order.

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Punditry

Leaving the Church

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

I found this article on NCR to be rather ironic. The article is your typical NCR dissident fair and checklist of everything from women’s ordination, divorce and remarriage, etc. The article is entitled Leaving New Orleans and the Catholic church.

After my long struggle to recognize the new spiritual self growing within, after leaving the church for a faith tradition I find more open and welcoming, and after confirming that I have chosen a path that is good and right for me, I have adopted as my favorite expression of assurance Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Now even for NCR it is difficult to understand this article appearing. Would you see in the National Review "Why I am no longer a conservative" or the new Republic "Why I am no longer a liberal." Or do they just allow an ode to leaving the Church since in many ways they have also done so?

There are several ways for the church to penalize or expel Catholics who lobby for change. The most extreme, of course, is excommunication, which rejects a person as Catholic unless or until that person formally admits and atones for the transgression. Persons are excommunicated not for sins of morality but for transgressions against faith — heresy.

Excommunication does not reject a person as Catholic. Excommunication is a canonical penalty and the person is to be denied access to the sacrament and from performing certain duties. It is a remedy to remind them and to bring them back into full communion with the Church. The ironic part was her writing from New Orleans is that Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel excommunicated several people relating to segregation which would be a sin of morality not heresy. Do you think the same people who worry about making Communion political would have denounced this act?

The article was written by Deborah Halter a longtime contributor to NCR. Please send some prayers her way.

The editor of NCR Tom Roberts writes Deborah Halter is a bright, engaging, devoted Catholic woman called to ordained ministry

Yes the magisterium of NCR has spoken. All bow and precede to burn copies of Ordination Sacerdotalis. Let us all go on pilgrimages to Kansas City so that we might see the Vatican of America. To try to catch of glimpse of Tom Roberts when he gives his Wednesday Audiences.

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Punditry

Affiliated ministries

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

Much has been made of Georgetown’s curt eviction of affiliated Protestant groups from campus. Now I could be wrong but I believe the Affiliated Ministries that got the axe were ones affiliated with outside Protestant groups and that they will still have local Protestant ministry that is not associated with these groups. I think this only makes sense since this is consistent with what the school has done in the past. These aren’t the first outside group that they separated themselves from. In fact I believe the first one was the Vatican. As far as I can tell they cut all ties between themselves and the Church some time ago. Their Catholic identity as Joseph Bottum’s relates pretty much only shows on fund raising letters to alumni.

One strange thing is that the official correspondence ejection notice starts off with "Blessings and may God’s peace be upon you!" As David French said "Blessings and may God’s peace be on you!” . . . Now get off campus!"

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Heretical Hymns

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

A reader sent me a link to an article by George Weigel at CERC entitled Heretical Hymns. I agree whole-heartily with his article that says

Thus, with tongue only half in cheek, I propose the Index Canticorum Prohibitorum, the "Index of Forbidden Hymns." Herewith, some examples.

And the suggestions are the chestnuts we all too often hear at Mass. And like chestnuts should be thrown into the fire.

As they say read the whole thing and it is rather short.

I once had a post titled Heretical Hymns where I wrote my own examples.

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Book Review

Salvation is from the Jews

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

I recently finished the book Salvation Is From the Jews by Roy H. Schoeman put out by Ignatius Press. The book is wide ranging in its topics. When I bought it I expected it to mainly be on the Old and New testaments with background information from a Jewish view. This was indeed part of the first half of the book and is worth the price of the book alone.

What I found interesting was how Jewish apologists will try to answer specific claims made by Christians. I have heard and read many hours of Protestant objections and I found this part of the book to be fascinating. Of course like Protestantism there is no one specific Jewish view on passages in the Old Testament or about predictions of the Messiah. Or that among a large swath of modern Jews even a belief in an afterlife. Roy Schoeman goes in depth through the messianic prophesies and how they relate to Jesus. He also details objections and their counters. I found lots of new information that I had not encountered before that I found fascinating.

He also goes into some of the Talmudic writing and how they also related to Jesus. While these of course are not inspired they definitely show the view of Rabbis at the time they were written and how they viewed the coming Messiah. One of these passages written after Jesus had died about a temple practice whose miraculous sign had stopped around the death of Jesus was very interesting.

I had often wondered how Jewish believers would deny that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied. All of salvation history was headed towards a crescendo of the birth of the Messiah, yet the Jewish view is that Prophets just stopped coming and there were no more inspired books to add to the canon. That the Temple just happened to be destroyed within a generation of Jesus’ death. This book goes a good distance and answering these questions.

Another good sized chapter discussed "Judaism and the Holocaust." The chapter covers not only the Holocaust but some of the Jewish religious reaction to the aftermath. He also goes into the debate of calling it this sad time in history the Shoah or the Holocaust. He favors Holocaust and explains his reason why. There are theological reasons why both sides of the debate favor their choices.

Another excellent chapter is "Ideological Foundations of Nazism." He debunks the idea that it was specifically Christian anti-semitism that lead to the Nazi regime. While it is certainly true that it existed and in some ways cooperated with the Nazi’s he shows it is in no way the cornerstone they built on. He traces Nazi spiritualism back to Theosophy for an occult racist theory which later added a mixture of German paganism. The development and basis of Nazi ideas is shown as it progress through many organizations and proponents of a master race and occult tendencies. This chapter covers a lot of information and as the rest of the book contains many footnotes to sources. You truly get a sense of the demonic in this chapter. He also details while Nazism was the most virulent form of anti-Semitism the anti-Semitism of the rest of the world aided Hitler. The chapter reminds us of how ships filled with Jewish people were turned back to Germany and the people later interned in the concentration camps because President Roosevelt would not budge from the quota system for immigrants. The U.S. was not alone in this and it was only two small countries in Europe that were accepting Jewish immigrants. The chapter also goes into the influence of Margaret Sanger and the people on the board of the Birth Control Review and how they were instrumental in the intellectual underpinnings of eugenics that became policy in Nazi germany.

The next chapter "anti-Semitism after the Holocaust" concentrates mainly on Arabs. He shows the history of Arab involvement with Hitler and for the most part their wholesale agreement with his agenda. This whole section really puts a lie to so much of what we hear today about anti-Semitism in the Middle East really being anti-Zionism. This rabid hatred was already in full swing long before Israel became a country. Mein Kamph has long been a best seller in Arabic. This chapter is well documented with quotations. The quotation from so-called moderate Anwar Sadat were just as hateful towards Jewish people as you hear from the most extreme sources. The only weakness in this chapter is that by concentrating mainly on Arabs it omits all the other forms of anti-Semitism that are present in the modern day.

The book continues with conversion stories to Catholicism that include some rather famous cases and some less well known. Even in the more famous cases he revealed details that I had not read in other treatments. To often these stories are treated as instantaneous conversions or that a specific event brought them out. He goes farther in these stories to show how their movement towards the Church was gradual for the most part. The book ends with his own conversion story and is another good read.

So as you can tel by this book I quite enjoyed it and his writing style moves you along quite quickly through the chapters.

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Little Way Bookstore

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

The Little Way book store in Corpus Christi has a great selection of books on Carmelite spirituality and a line of photographs and holy cards imported from France and published by Office Central de Lisieux. Their prices from the books I looked at are comparable to Amazon.com.

Two of my favorite books are also included. Elizabeth of the Trinity The Complete Works Volume 1, Volume 2. This lesser known Carmelite Blessed should be wider known and here collection of letters in these books are a wonder to read.

Cynthia Kerr the owner has also started a new blog.

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Parody

Coming to a parish near you

by Jeffrey Miller
written by Jeffrey Miller

I have found out via one of my sources that the Pope has not just strictly been vacationing at Castle Gondolfo and that he has in fact been working with a group of people on a new program. There has long been a speculation of a reform of a reform of the liturgy, but that the Holy Father is not going to take drastic steps. Many of us have been waiting for the final document from the Synod on the Eucharist which is expected to be released later this year. In the meantime Pope Benedict XVI has decided to concentrate on the basics.

Many have complained about liturgical abuses and outright disobedience. Francis Cardinal Arinze said "The do-it-yourself Mass is ended. Go in peace," but we have not seen too many concrete actions in this direction. What we didn’t know is that the Holy See has started looking at this problem from a direction most of us have not considered. We have assigned all types of reasons for liturgical abuses that in many cases were not the most charitable explanation possible. We have assumed ill will in cases where none existed. The breakthrough came about through via some testing that provided surprising results. A group of 500 priests were tested with a sample page from the sacramentary and asked to read aloud the text and to perform the rubrics. The results showed that a large group of priests got most of the text right, yet failed to perform the rubrics satisfactory. These results lead to further testing. The astonishing result was that a large group of priests had a form of color blindness that was not known in medical circles.

This is an example of what priests who did the rubrics satisfactory sees.

This is an example of what the other priests see.

Rubric blindness, or rubric vision deficiency, in humans is the inability to perceive rubrics. It is some times of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain liturgist and heterodox theologians. What normally happens is that this condition is not caught in seminary before they are ordained. The priest knows he is suppose to do something at these points but does not want to embarrass himself by saying he can’t see them. They go on like people who are functionally illiterate and cope with the world around them. Unfortunately when they look around at other Masses to see what other priests are doing at these points in the liturgy they find no standards.

As a result this is what they come to see in the sacramentary. A type of optical illusion confirms for them what they suspect must be there. The human brain often tries to fill in information when it perceives missing data and this is the basis for many optical illusions. There is an old saying about people seeing red when they are angry, but now we know there are also a class of people who don’t see red when reading from liturgical documents.

The study classed these people as illiturgerate and that many liturgical abuses were from those who were acting as functional illiturgerates. Illiturgacy is not something that we just have to live with and is something that should not stigmatize priests. The researches found that those suffering with rubric vision deficiency could indeed overcome this liturgical disability and go on to not only see rubrics (many for the first time) but to follow them.

The Pope is just about to release a new program that will specifically address these problems and as a world exclusive I can give you the details.

Hooked on Rubrics works by using a series of flash cards with varying red colors on them. Repeated drill and variation of color shades enables the priest to start to discern colors that previously appeared transparent to them. When this first step is satisfactory completed the next step is to drill an association with reading the rubrics and then performing them without illicit variations.

Previous liturgy teaching methods were part of the problems instead of relying on age-old methods to teach the liturgy they relied on untested teaching theories that failed in practice. The whole liturgy instructional philosophy that is currently prevalent emphasizes seeing the whole liturgy instead on concentrating on all the different parts that make it up. Some priests who were once able to see rubrics were trained not to see them, Hooked on Rubrics reverses this process. Hooked on Rubrics instead concentrates on getting the little things right, thus ensuring the big things are also done correctly. He who is faithful in little is faithful in much.

An added benefit to the Hooked on Rubrics method is that they have actually been able to see other colors better and how they coordinate with other colors. Many after going through this program went back to their parishes and had many stoles thrown away that had horrible color combinations that they were previously unaware of and were now embarrassed of having owned.

Hooked on Rubrics for priests is just the start of some of the new programs coming out. There will also be versions for the laity. While most of the laity don’t suffer from rubric vision deficiency they do suffer from "simon says" syndrome where constantly most of the gestures and postures they perform are done in imitation of the priest instead of doing the ones specially meant for them. Many of the laity are quite surprised to learn that there is a part of the Nicene’s Creed where they bow or that the strike their breast during the Confeitor.

A version of Hooked on Rubrics was also developed for liturgists. Unfortunately so far all attempts at getting them to see or follow rubrics has been to no avail. Two liturgists in the tests who started to discern rubrics ended up going insane and subsequently had to be locked up. Seeing rubrics for the first time made them doubt everything they believed and stood for and it was just too much for them. There might be some underlying psychological reason for this. For some reason all liturgist given a ink blot test saw liturgical dancers in every pattern. They also had the tendency to move about the furniture in the psychologist’s office for no discernable reason.

Other programs soon to be developed:

  • Hooked on Homiletics – Flash cards from the Church Fathers serves as an introduction.
  • Hooked on Vatican II – This program experiments with the mostly untried method of actually reading the documents of Vatican II.
  • Hooked on Orthodoxy
  • Hooked on Magisterium
  • Hooked on Jesus – A course for all of us.

I thinks these are sound parish pedagogical practices and hopefully they will soon be seen in a parish near you!

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