Punditry

The Washington Post has an article on a church actually called "Inclusive Community" which contains Catholic priests who left to marry and other cultural Catholics who don’t like the baggage of Christ’s actual teachings. As is usually the case the word inclusive can easily be substituted for liberal. Their views are never inclusive enough to believe all that the magisterium of the Church teaches is true. To not deny any teachings of the faith would be inclusive, once you start snipping some of you become exclusive by the very act of excluding them.

She grew up Roman Catholic, but like millions of others, Rebecca Ortelli came to disagree with church teachings on contraception, communion and priestly celibacy, among other things.

Many Catholics drift away from the church or join other denominations. But Ortelli, 57, wanted to maintain both her Catholic identity and her worldview. And she didn’t want to feel one was inconsistent with the other.

So 20 years ago, she did what a small number of defiant Catholics are doing. She joined a church with many lifelong Catholics of similar views, a church that borrows heavily from Catholic rituals even though it’s not part of a Catholic diocese.

"I don’t think I should have to give up my Catholicism. That’s part of who I am. It makes me who I choose to be," said Ortelli, whose church, in Nutley, N.J., is called the Inclusive Community. "I like some of the rituals that we have. They’re important."

The cultural Catholic phenomenon is kind of like the Urban Cowboy one. People dressing up in Cowboy hats and boots who have never ridden a horse or lived on a ranch. That by performing some rituals or putting on a cowboy hat you can call yourself either a Catholic or a cowboy. In some ways this shows the power of rituals and how they shape us, but rituals ripped from their context and roots become pretty empty and devoid an any real meaning. This might explain why their services receive a whopping 15 members.

MANITOWOC – Kathy Sullivan Vandenberg will describe her journey to the unsanctioned priesthood for a woman in the Catholic Church at an engagement set for 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, at the Holiday Inn.

So I guess there is the priesthood of the faithful, ministerial priesthood, and the unsanctioned priesthood. The event for "priestess" Kathy Sullivan Vandenberg is being sponsored by Pax Christi.

A recent Commonweal article by Fr. Francis X. Clooney, SJ on interreligious dialogue and mean-old-bruske Pope Benedict contained the following:

While few sensible Christians would be so brusque today, the question of the meaning of Islam for Christians is still with us, particularly if (by tradition, habit, or conviction) many Christian leaders avoid speaking of the Qur’an as revelation or of Mohammed as a true prophet.

Now I really don’t have much expectation for much of anything written in Commonweal, but this sentence makes my jaw drop to shoe level. Whattaya know Christian leaders don’t refer to a false prophet and his false revelations as being real – you learn something everyday.

Luckily I don’t have to spend the time to rip up this article because the master Dale Price already took to it. Whoever came up with the pen is mightier than the sword had Dale in mind. The rest of the article is also pretty mind-numbing.

The Webmaster at Semper Fi Catholic sent me this story.

The letter "X" soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The commission’s damning of the letter "X" came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a new service carrying the English name "Explorer."

"No! Nein! Nyet!" was the commission’s categorical answer.

Why?

Well, never mind that none of the so-called scholars manning the upper ranks of the religious outfit can speak or read a word of English. But their experts who examined the English word "explorer" were struck by how suspicious that "X" appeared. In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination.

So after waiting a year, the Saudi businessman, Amru Mohammad Faisal, got his answer: No.

Quick nobody tell them about the Tau and St. Francis. We need to speak up against this alphabetical jihad against the letter X. Sure this letter has fallen on hard times with it’s association with a rating and the small number of words that start with this letter. I mean if we let them be prejudicial against some letters then what’s next? Will they move from consonants to perhaps disemvowel an a? Ah the irony of a letter derived from the Phoenician alphabet being discriminated against by Arabs.

A Catholic bishop in Nigeria has instructed parishioners to show they have registered to vote in elections this April or be banned from communion, a newspaper This Day reported on Tuesday.

Bishop Francis Okobo, who oversees the diocese of Nsukka in the southeastern state of Enugu, authorised the circulation of a bulletin in Catholic churches on Sunday telling the faithful that they had to make their vote count in this year’s elections.

Parishioners were told not to be put off by the outcome of past elections in which the votes of the people did not count because of massive vote rigging.

"Whoever has not collected the voter’s card after February 7 has automatically alienated himself or herself from the community, the Church, the nation and will not be allowed to receive the holy communion," the bulletin said according to This Day.

I would like to see the opposite program here for Catholic politicians. No vote, receive Communion. In issues driven by the Culture of Death the best thing most Catholic politicians could do was not to vote. Unfortunately mostly we have "Vote however you want and still receive Communion program" in most diocese. Partial birth abortion, no problem come right in. Federal funding of ESCR, it’s not my style to deny Communion so come right this way and commit sacrilege and scandal.

LOS ANGELES – When people talk about seeing holy signs, they don’t usually mean "Your Ad HERE."

That was the message which appeared Wednesday evening as a 50-foot projected image on the bell tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, headquarters of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

Visible to thousands of commuters on a nearby freeway, the sign was gone the next day.

It wasn’t authorized by the archdiocese, spokesman Tod Tamberg said.

"A church tower is different from a billboard. If it wasn’t, we would have been selling ad space 2,000 years ago," he said. "There are plenty of ways to communicate without making ad space out of your sanctuaries. I think most people would react negatively to that."

Turns out, the sign wasn’t really trolling for advertisers. It was a guerrilla art piece by James Cui.

"I’m flattered you noticed," the 28-year-old Highland Park graphic artist told the Los Angeles Times, which called a telephone number listed on the sign.

"I hoped I was hitting a lot of people with it," Cui said. "That’s the trick in L.A. The only way to hit a lot of people is on the freeway."

Cui uses a laptop computer, a video projector and a portable electric generator to cast the images on blank walls.

This was really a wasted opportunity of the signs that could have been placed on the Taj Mahony. Such as perhaps "Ugly Cathedral for sale, Our Lady of Cement Blocks, or Our Lady of the Angles as some have called it. I am sure my readers could come up with a few more.

From an article about Holy Angels Church –
An Ecumenical Catholic Community (first off never trust a Church whose parish website is on geocites) about their new "Deacons."

She said she encouraged her husband to become a deacon. He wanted her to become one as well.

"It seemed the right thing and the right time and place," she said. "Because really all it is, in some ways, is the formalization of what we already are, as opposed to something entirely new. It was a natural progression."

Most of the training was background material for Donald Metz.

"I’ve been president of the parish council liturgy boards and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and for each had lots of training programs, and that’s training which is spread throughout a lifetime," he said.

Yea all that background with liturgy and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine really paid off in joining a faux Catholic church founded by Reverend Patricia A. Zorn who specializes in products like "Flower Essences for Animal." She does have some profound things to say about the meaning of life though.

Baptism/Baby Naming Ceremony: Life is Hello!

Bereavement: Life is Goodbye!

Now I am confused which is it? Maybe she is well versed in those two pop theologians Paul McCartney and John Lennon (who was bigger than Jesus you know).

You say yes, I say no
You say stop and I say go, go, go
Oh, no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello, hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye
I say hello
Hello, hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye
I say hello

Part of their Mission Statement also made me laugh.

We are a Community of Believers, members of all religious faiths, and from every walk of life.
We are deeply rooted in Holy Scripture and firmly grounded in Christian Tradition.

Wow this must be a really really large church. Members from all religious faiths? Hindus, Gnostics, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Pagans, Pantheists, Falun Gong, Taoism, Baptists, Russian Orthodox, Catholics, etc all in one church founded in Holy Scripture and Christian tradition. Not to mentions from every walk of life. Considering the thousand of professions this is really quite an accomplishment. I wonder what there mission statement was before they found that next to last person from a walk of life or religion. Gee if we could just find a Sunni who is also a shoemaker we will finally have them all.

Via Mary Meets Dolly

I found this gem in the Telegraph. In this piece, Roger Highfield writes about the unease about breeding cloned animals the conventional way and letting them enter the food chain. This is a very real conundrum. Most people agree they don’t want to eat meat from a cloned cow (although they are clamouring to inject themselves with embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos) but what about the offspring of a cloned cow. The daughter cow is technically not a clone, but "half-a-clone." Does that count? Would you eat the offspring of a cloned cow?

What left me scratching my head about this piece is how Mr. Highfield finishes it:

Underlying much of the concern about a calf that is not even herself a clone is the "yuck factor". This articulates a visceral fear that these methods are unnatural, though what people mean by this is hard to say.

After all, in the Garden of Eden, the first life was reproduced by cloning. Like Dundee Paradise, we all have clones in our family tree.

Huh? I guess I just wasn’t expecting a science editor to suggest that Adam and Eve were our real ancestors and that they were clones in the same breath.

If Eve was a clone then I guess we need to revise history since it was not Alexander Graham Bell, but Satan who made the first clone fall.

More seriously though Rebecca is right is wondering about this add convergence. Sillier though is if Eve was cloned then she would be genetically identical to Adam and of course of the same gender.

ATLANTA (BP)– Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proposed the establishment of a broadly inclusive alternative Baptist movement to counter what they called a negative image of Baptists and to address poverty, the environment and global conflicts.

Carter and Clinton kicked off their plans with a news conference Jan. 9 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, flanked by leaders of moderate Baptist groups including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a breakaway group of an unverified number of churches that objected to the election of conservative leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention. Carter and Clinton announced a “Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant,” tentatively set for Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2008, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, which they hope will attract 20,000 Baptists.
[Via Jay Anderson]

An alternative to the Southern Baptist conference? I wonder what they will call it? Perhaps "Way Southern Baptist", that is they are so way South that they can smell sulfur.

Vatican, Jan. 9, 2007 (CWNews.com) – The president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care has welcomed a new breakthrough in research using stem cells from amniotic fluids.

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan told a Vatican Radio audience that the latest discovery was welcome because it allowed for the stem cells to be harvested without any threat to the life of the donor.

The Church, the cardinal pointed out, does not object to stem-cell research in itself, but to the harvesting in which human embryos are destroyed in order to obtain stem cells. The use of amniotic fluid involves no such destruction of human life.

It is pretty good news that this development has been reported fairly widely. Usually any actual breakthroughs that dealt with any process that did not actually require the destruction of human embryos received pretty much a media blackout.

Not that this will have any effect on the political debate. Even if amniotic fluid produced stem-cells that were exactly equal to the purported capabilities of embryonic stem-cells it would not matter. The political debate has never really been about cures, but a reaction to any attempt to admit that human embryos are persons and should not be destroyed. This is the only explanation for the totally unbalanced hype and subsequent coverage between embryonic and non-embryonic sources of stem-cells.

To prove the point.

Paolo De Coppi told the Italian ANSA news agency that a groundbreaking paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology had previously been rejected by four different journals. “It took seven years to get our paper published,” he said.

De Coppi and his colleague, Anthony Atala, demonstrated that stem cells derived from amniotic fluid could be used to generate many different types of body tissues, which could be used in the treatment of diseases. For the purposes of medical research, their paper argued, the stem cells taken from amniotic fluid show more promise than those obtained from human embryos.

Nevertheless, De Coppi told ANSA, his research was unwelcome in some quarters. He concluded that his paper was met by “a resistance to the idea of finding an alternative to embryonic stem cells,” because many leading researchers– particularly in the US– are so heavily invested in embryo research.

The researches in this case have no ethical problems with ESCR itself in the first place, they just made the mistake of finding another source.

Though I do wonder if this work turns out to be truly promising if there is still the problem of using stem-cells that are not yours and having the body reject them. That is why so much effort has been put into cloning in the first place. News stories don’t often mention that they would have to create of clone of yourself first, kill it, and then harvest the embryonic stem-cells – kind of a self-cannibalism.