Jeffrey Miller

The Washington Post covers an amazing sub-species, Catholic who actually love their faith. As Christopher Blosser notes:

Jacqueline L. Salmon of the Washington Post discovers a rare form of Catholic and marvels at their peculiar behavior: they’re young! they don’t question the Church’s teachings! they attend the Tridentine Mass regularly and go to confession!

Actually, I shouldn’t be so hard. After browsing article after article accentuating the gulf between Benedict and American Catholics, it’s refreshing to see a newspaper present the lives of the orthodox in a fairly straightforward manner.

The article actually is pretty good and not sneering, but you do get paragraphs like this:

They appreciate Benedict for his unwavering advocacy of what they hold to be "Catholic": ancient liturgical practices such as the traditional Latin Mass, the supremacy of the Catholic Church, Gregorian chants in worship and theologians who concur with the pope’s teachings. As the Vatican’s orthodoxy watchdog for 24 years before becoming pope, Benedict earned this group’s devotion.

In so many articles anything controversial is always mentioned as the Pope’s teaching and not the Church’s teaching. I found it ironic in a recent article by Peter Steinfel in the NYT about Clichéd Coverage in the Media he mentions abortion, contraception, same sex marriage and then relates it to "papal positions." Talk about a cliche, but amazingly the rest of Steinfel’s article is also pretty good.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Air Force Academy is mandating that hundreds of students and faculty members attend a closed-door lecture on religious intolerance. It will also show clips from Constantine�s Sword, an upcoming movie. Catholic League president Bill Donohue registered his objections to this event today:

� The person pushing this agenda is Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation; he also appears in the film. In the mission statement of his organization, he stakes out a position against any member of the armed forces being �compelled to conform to a particular religion or religious philosophy.� But evidently Weinstein has no problem orchestrating a propaganda film that trashes Catholicism�in the name of fighting religious intolerance�all the while insisting that the cadets and faculty be �compelled� to attend.

�The movie is based on the widely discredited book by James Carroll, an embittered ex-priest. The book says the Gospels are inherently anti-Semitic and that unless the New Testament is gutted to the point where the messiahship of Jesus is rejected, Christian anti-Semitism will not end.

Well maybe they are using the vaccine theory to explain this. That is use an anti-Catholic source to explain religious tolerance, kind of like using snake venom to help with snake bite victims.

Southern Appeal

The movie Constantine’s Sword is coming out during the Pope’s visit. I guess with Easter being early this year they couldn’t get it out in time for Holy Week. Christopher Blosser’s excellent "Benedict in America" blog previously posted on this movie and the background to Carroll’s book that mistakenly got labeled history instead of alternate history.

In other fun Catholic entertainment news Carl Olson posted on NBC doing four-hour mini-series based on the novel, The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury, a basic Da Vinci Code clone. This book like the Da Vinci Code tried to pass itself off as not just being fiction since the author says "The Last Templar works as a thought-provoking exploration of religion in today’s world, and of historic fact versus faith, particularly regarding the origins of the Catholic Church."

In even more art news we have another homoerotic version of Christ’s Last Supper being displayed which shows the Apostles having an orgy. Now you might think, boring! Yet another homoerotic piece of art where an artist isn’t even creative enough to do something new. Though this painting was displayed a the museum of Vienna’s Roman Catholic Cathedral and the museum curator was rather surprised at the negative reaction.

Guess you can’t guess how he defended the original decision? Well actually I bet you can guess since it was basically "art should be allowed to provoke a debate." I guess museum curators are no more creative than many modern artists. But he must be pretty smart and have a degree or something. The reason I say this is only someone with a degree could say the following:

"I don’t see any blasphemy here," he said, gesturing at a Crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding his genitals. "People can imagine what they want to."

Yeah you with dirty minds it’s all your fault that you jump to a conclusion instead of seeing the deeper symbolic meaning.

Diognes notices the irony of a U.S. Today article on the Pope visit, though not concerning the visit itself.
In it George Weigel gives his opinion of the Pope and his visit
followed by a much more negative view by Fr. Reese S.J. where he says "Benedict is still stifling theologians. Theologians worry because the Vatican insists we continue to explain the gospel in the language of the 13th century."

The irony is that recently George Weigel has written a couple of columns concerning the state of the Jesuit order that was much decried within Jesuit ranks. So it is rather funny in an article that quotes George Weigel that they manage to provide proof for his contention.

I also think that the word processing programs that journalists use has a macro that anytime they type Thomas Reese it will automatically append " Jesuit priest and former editor of the Jesuit-owned magazine America. Reese lost that job just after Ratzinger was elected pope;" Getting "fired" was the best thing that could have happened to him since it has even made him more the media darling and the go to guy for journalist wanting the right spin desired for a story. Now I of course jest about this being the best thing that has happened to him, but I bet their are other Jesuit editors right now thinking "What do I gotta do to get fired?" Well maybe I jest about that also.

One thing I find interesting about the whole Weigel/Jesuit kerfuffle is that I wish they would have the same energy against those in their order who teach something contrary to the faith. Many seem to ignore if someone in their order gives them a black eye, but get mad when someone points out the black eye A Jesuit can write in support of abortion and euthanasia and it goes without comment, but if someone writes about the Jesuit who supports abortion and/or euthanasia then that needs a response.

Any Welborn in response to the same article:

… Again, reporters – when a source says something about the Vatican insisting that theological language be that of the 13th century – push . Ask what exactly that means. Request specific examples. Be conversant enough with recent documents – say, the last few encyclicals, from both Benedict and John Paul II – to question that statement in light of those documents. Know that Benedict’s encyclicals sell in the hundreds of thousands when they are published, his books are best sellers for any publisher who gets them and the Vatican website gets millions of hits a day.

Are all those people conversant in 13th-Centuryese?

And once again, add new names to the Rolodex

Well maybe the reporter realized that the comment was pure hyperbole, though probably not. The charitable view is that the statement is hyperbole because otherwise is it just plain malicious or ignorant. Anybody who has read either the Pope writing’s or the books he wrote before being elected as Pope would laugh at such an assertion. The Pope’s book Jesus of Nazareth liberally quotes modern scriptural scholars and praises the good of it where in enlightens and lightly chastises it when it goes astray. Even when Cardinal Ratzinger had to discipline theologians, which was very rare, it was not because there language was not 13th century, but because it was not sufficiently first century in that it contradicted scriptural or Apostolic tradition.