Jeffrey Miller

Edwina Gateley, a Catholic laywoman and author of 10 books, got cold feet and opted out of her speaking engagement, when informed her seminar would be taped in order to review content during a retreat at a Franciscan Renewal Center. She stood to lose $4,000 from the canceled engagement, but two unidentified women who thought it best to remain anonymous covered the costs to speak at a series of alternative events during the same time frame. Since her feminist theology of a feminine god is well known, I have my suspicions about the organizers of the event and the 20 nuns who signed up to hear her.

Gateley insists that her refusal of being recorded is due to the producers of her copy written material forbidding outside tapings of her talks, but is more likely the manifestation of her fundamental rejection of authority along with the fear and insecurity that comes from being denied the total control to which she is accustomed.

	Jester Hat Tip:	CLS

I guess she didn’t want to see her "retreat" turned into a DVD called "Catholic Feminists gone theologically wild." This though is a great idea if a diocese would tape all retreats for review. For one having a video of good retreats could be very useful. The other reason of course is that like in this case many would be hesitant to have what they say taped. Often they will have the name of their speeches shrouded in terms that make it just possible that they might be orthodox for plausible deniability sake.

This is of course also the reason that when a couple years back EWTN went down with a film crew to Cardinal Mahony’s Religious Education Congress that they were not allowed to film any of the speeches.

I was listening to the Hugh Hewitt show and he was interviewing Kenneth L. Woodward about an article on Romney that had a lot of Mormon bashing in it. Woodward has been responsible for Newsweek’s Religion section since 1964 and he identified himself as a Catholic. In part of the interview Hugh was asking him the difference between some aspects of Mormonism and Catholicism and Woodward went on to explain that infallibility was something that has only been invoked once in the last 150 years and this happened in the 1950s.

Now I am not surprise to hear that people responsible for religions sections of the MSM would know so little about their faith. For one he event gets the common misunderstanding wrong. Normally people will claim that there has only been two acts of infallibility since Vatican I defined it. This would of course be the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950. So to say there is was only one case is to get even this wrong. The truth is that the Pope uses the charism of infallibility every time there is a canonization. The language used in a canonization is "we declare and define that Blessed N., is a saint" which triggers the Church’s gift of infallibility. It would be true to say that there have been only two dogmatic declarations since Vatican I, but not that these were the only case of papal infallibility.

Then of course there is the fact that infallibility was something that came into play many times in the history of the Church especially in regards to Church councils. The dogma of infallibility was only defined in 1870 and many think that it didn’t exist for then, but this would be like saying that Jesus wasn’t divine until the 1st Council of Nicea.

Mr. Woodward could not even come up with any differences between Mormon prophets and when the Church invokes its gift of infallibility. There is a large gap between development of doctrine and the defining of one and the abrupt changes that have occurred in Mormonism.

All I can say is that if Kenneth L. Woodward is as knowledgeable of other faiths as he is about his own then that explains the Newsweek coverage.

Hugh’s post on the subject

Jimmy Akin’s post on infallibility.

Update: I made a glaring error since the Immaculate Conception was defined before Vatican I and so there has only been one dogmatic declaration since Vatican I.

It is not exactly difficult to point out liberal bias in the L.A. Times, but Bill Donahue uncovers a perfect case of it. Cardinal Mahoney spoke out forcibly during Mass about Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Catholic, for supporting a bill to allow doctor-assisted suicide in the state of California

Los Angeles Times writer George Skelton criticized the Cardinal in his April 5 column. In it, he referred to the Catholic Church as “looking like an ugly old political attack dog.” He also accused the Cardinal of violating the American separation of church and state and called for “a bill to reexamine the tax-exempt status of church property.”

Now to rewind just over a year ago the same writer praised the Cardinal.

He noted how an editorial in the Los Angeles Times on March 2, 2006, commended Cardinal Mahony for “reinforcing the right of religious leaders to speak out on the moral ramifications of political issues.” The issue that Cardinal Mahony addressed then was immigration.

We hear a lot of sturm and drang that President Bush is "anti-science" because of his opposition to human cloning and full federal funding of destroying embryos for ESCR. But these positions don’t make the President anti-science: That dispute is about ethics. People can agree or disagree about the ethics, but one can be–as I am–both pro science and anti-human cloning.

There is a bill now before the Senate that will test whether the pro-ESCR Democrats are also pro-science. S.30, the "Hope Offered through Principled and Ethical Stem Cell Research" would federally fund "alternatives" to destructive ESCR, such as "reprogramming," in which an ordinary body cell may be reverted back to its embryonic stem cell state–a feat accomplished already in mice.

This bill passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate last year and in the House, but not with a "super majority" needed to clear a procedural hurdle. Unfortunately, S. 30 is being held hostage to the ESCR bill–much like the umbilical cord blood banking bill was held up for years before finally passing. But whether or not one supports or opposes traditional ESCR, there is no substantial reason to oppose S. 30, given the dearth of ethical controversy and the great scientific potential. (Ian Wilmut, of Dolly fame, has stated he believes reprogramming will be usable for medical therapies before human cloning.) If the Democrats who control the Congress shoot down this bill, it won’t be because of ethical considerations but pure politics, and a desire to thwart one avenue of stem cell experiments in order to boost another. And that would be anti-science.

	Jester Hat Tip:	Wesley J. Smith

The anti-science meme has been used more and more at anybody who is against cloning or ESCR and of course the term fundamentalist is also being bandied about in this relation. You truth is that everybody believes ethical limits need to be put on research and what can be scientifically possible. The same people that would call Bush and others anti-science for wanting to restrict research in some area often will want restrictions placed on genetic modification of food (so called Frankenfoods), missile shield testing to totally go away, and animal testing to stop.

This is just another sign of the breakdown of debate that instead of proponents of something making their case, they instead use ridiculous labels to minimize the other side. Anti-science, anti-choice are just of few of the terms used so that they don’t have to actually debate what they disagree with.