Jeffrey Miller

I often like Deacon Greg Kandra blog The Deacon’s Bench with his general link coverage of a lot of what is going on. Though sometimes he can really annoy me. Sometimes I want the blog of The Deacon’s Bench to be benched, though really I just want a little more accuracy.

Case in point today with the headline “New call for divorced and remarried Catholics to be able to receive communion” and his post starting with:

It’s something the pope himself has said needs a closer look.

Immediately my theological spidey-sense when a-tingling. Sorry, but that is just totally mistaken as being connected with that headline. The idea that the Church will ever change the basic premise that those in objectively grave sin can received Communion is just plain ignorant. Before I did any research to check what the Pope has actually said on the subject I forecasted that the Pope was speaking in regards to pastoral considerations in how we deal with this situation, and not about receiving Holy Communion in this state.

Thankfully Canonist Ed Peters did the heavy lifting already on what the Pope has actually said or written and it was as I suspected.

If you are going to make claims such like what Deacon Greg Kandra wrote, he should have made some attempt to back it up. His later update was to an article in the Vatican Insider that had the same sloppiness with no recourse to what the Pope has actually written. As Ed Peters sums up:

But in the meantime, those who claim Benedict XVI as a proponent of formally admitting Catholics in irregular marriages to holy Communion need, I suggest, to parse more carefully what the pope actually said about this matter on various occasions, and to identify more carefully what he actually holds regarding this important question.

The Pope indeed has written on the subject and he wrote in his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacrementum Caritatis under “The Eucharist and the indissolubility of marriage”:

29. If the Eucharist expresses the irrevocable nature of God’s love in Christ for his Church, we can then understand why it implies, with regard to the sacrament of Matrimony, that indissolubility to which all true love necessarily aspires. (91) There was good reason for the pastoral attention that the Synod gave to the painful situations experienced by some of the faithful who, having celebrated the sacrament of Matrimony, then divorced and remarried. This represents a complex and troubling pastoral problem, a real scourge for contemporary society, and one which increasingly affects the Catholic community as well. The Church’s pastors, out of love for the truth, are obliged to discern different situations carefully, in order to be able to offer appropriate spiritual guidance to the faithful involved.(92) The Synod of Bishops confirmed the Church’s practice, based on Sacred Scripture (cf. Mk 10:2- 12), of not admitting the divorced and remarried to the sacraments, since their state and their condition of life objectively contradict the loving union of Christ and the Church signified and made present in the Eucharist. Yet the divorced and remarried continue to belong to the Church, which accompanies them with special concern and encourages them to live as fully as possible the Christian life through regular participation at Mass, albeit without receiving communion, listening to the word of God, eucharistic adoration, prayer, participation in the life of the community, honest dialogue with a priest or spiritual director, dedication to the life of charity, works of penance, and commitment to the education of their children.

Sure I realize that blog posts are not intended for theological depths, but they shouldn’t lead you to believe something totally in error. Judging by the 84 comments so far I believe I am not the only one annoyed.

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator.

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs, referencing the seven point scale of belief that he sets out in his bookThe God Delusion.

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

An incredulous Sir Anthony replied: “You are described as the world’s most famous atheist,” to which Prof Dawkins retorted, “Well not by me!” to much laughter among the audience.

The two men were taking part in a public “dialogue” at Oxford University at the end of a week which has seen bitter debate about the role of religion in public life in Britain.

I don’t think this story is as much of a big deal as it is being made out to be. Very few atheists would take the position of a 100 percent certainty that there is no God. Though I think it is an error to describe anybody who has high certainty that there is no God as an agnostic. For them they have weighed the evidence and not found that nothing is known or can be known of the existence of the God, but that enough is known to positively accept that there is no God. An agnostic sits on the fence and sees the balance of what can be known as inconclusive for either side.

No word yet if he will rename his book the “The God Delusion” to the “The 6.9 out of 7 there is no God Delusion.” Though I find it quite interesting that he considers this a significant scale. Especially since so many of the numbers involving chance evolution are quite large involving double exponents. For example a 0.98571428571429 chance there is a God by his scale is whopping compared to a purely natural chance of life evolving as it has.  The 0.98571428571429 chance is quite reasonable compared to the old millions of monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare eventually.

Prof Dawkins told him: “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

On the subject of evolution my thought is that “However God brought about the human race is fine with me. I just know he was involved.”

A biologist like Dawkins focuses on life evolving out of nothing, but conveniently leaves out that the universe could not evolve out of nothing. The need for “reality” involving space and time requiring an “unconditioned reality” outside of space and time is covered quite excellently in Fr. Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy.  Fr. Spitzer also recently did a very nice job on two hours of Catholic Answers Live and I quite enjoyed his responding to an atheist who called in on the impossibility of omnipotence.

Another area why I think this is overblown is that while the majority of believers also have a high certainty of God, they do not have absolute certainty.  Blessed John Henry Newman in his book “An Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Assent” really delves into the subject of certainty and knowledge.  There is essentially no one who does not have doubt on the subject.

…both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both sides from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one, it is this share in the fate of the unbeliever; for the other, the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him. – then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger “Introduction to Christianity“

* Photo Credit

His Eminence Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, President, and His Excellency Most Reverend William E. Lori, Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, released a statement on the HHS mandate, dated February 21, 2012, to the bishops of the United States.

You can read the text of the letter over at Insight Scoop.

The letter really says what needs to be said, makes all the right distinctions, and rightly invokes the supreme gravity of the situation concerning the free exercise of religion.

Much remains to be done. We cannot rest when faced with so grave a threat to the religious liberty for which our parents and grandparents fought. In this moment in history we must work diligently to preserve religious liberty and to remove all threats to the practice of our faith in the public square. This is our heritage as Americans. President Obama should rescind the mandate, or at the very least, provide full and effective measures to protect religious liberty and conscience

As I understand it the mandate itself is part of Obamacare and not something the President can rescind. The narrow interpretation of how the mandate was applied is directly in his purview. Though ultimately it is Obamacare itself that must be repealed, especially the mandate. Even if the President backs down and the HHS interprets the exemption in a more traditional way it still would not protect private employers who object but are not under the category of a religious institution. The mandate was tyrannical even before the HHS ruling.

Inn some good news involving conscience protection.

Today, religious liberty gained a resounding victory. A federal court in Tacoma, Washington, struck down a Washington law that requires pharmacists to dispense the morning-after pill even when doing so would violate their religious beliefs. The court held that the law violates the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

“Today’s decision sends a very clear message: No individual can be forced out of her profession solely because of her religious beliefs,” said Luke Goodrich, Deputy National Litigation Director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The Becket Fund, together with the Seattle-based law firm of Ellis, Li & McKinstry, represents the plaintiffs in the case. “If the state allows pharmacies to refer patients elsewhere for economic, business, and convenience reasons, it has to allow them to refer for reasons of conscience,” added Mr. Goodrich.