Punditry

First there was:

Then:

And now:

What is up with Catholic Cathedrals in California?  Is is something in the water that causes Bishops and Cardinals to lose a Catholic aesthetic taste and to turn to architecture  that will not stand the test of time?

Will the Mass in the Crystal Cathedral be known as the “The Hour of Eucharistic Power”?

Just how much of people’s tithes will be going to supplying Windex?

Should Canon Law be changed to restrict bishops from buying protestant cathedrals just as they are ready to retire?  He actually passed retirement age two days ago.  Or is this the greatest practical joke ever from a bishop to his successor?  Maybe this is a very interesting challenge for his successor to transform the interior, though considering paying $57.5 million for it there is not going to be any money left from a diocese already in financial difficulty as a result of the abuse problem.

The Benetton clothing company has withdrawn an ad showing Pope Benedict XVI kissing a top Egyptian imam on the lips after the Vatican denounced it as an “unacceptable” provocation.

Benetton had said its “Unhate” campaign launched Wednesday is aimed at fostering tolerance and “global love.”

The campaign’s fake photos show a half-dozen purported political nemeses in lip-locked embraces, including President Barack Obama and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The photo of the Pope had been on the company’s website all day but was pulled about an hour after the Vatican’s protest. A Benetton spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that the Pope ad is no longer part of the campaign.

Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi said in a statement that the ad was “an offence against the sentiments of the faithful and a clear example of how advertising can violate elementary rules of respect for people in order to attract attention through provocation.”

On the company’s website, executive deputy chairman Alessandro Benetton is quoted as saying that global love is an ambitious but realistic goal.

You mean an ad campaign showing world leaders kissing each other is an unrealistic goal for “global love”? Who would have thunk it?

The picture itself shown here is one I would rather erase from my mind. You just have to wonder how such an ad ever came about in the first place.

Now this is a pretty crazy story.

The Religious Education department for Bonus Pastor Catholic College in Lewisham, England apparently showed some rather sick videos promoting sex and suicide.

• Parents complain to the school and are basically ignored
• They setup a website Bonus Pastor Exposed
• Headmaster sends out letter saying your computer could get hacked if you visit the website
• Parents hand out leaflets by the school but not on the school ground
• School calls the police on them

Pledging to adhere to state legislation requiring equal treatment for same-sex couples in adoption and foster-care services, Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois is separating from the Diocese of Belleville. The agency will now be called Christian Social Services of Illinois.

“The Catholic Diocese of Belleville has announced that Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois (CSS), consistently one of the most highly rated providers of foster care and other social services in the State of Illinois, is separating from the Diocese of Belleville,” the diocese said in a statement. “It will no longer be connected to or sponsored by the Diocese.”

“Unable to remain faithful to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church while adhering to the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, the 64-year-old social service agency chose to disassociate from the Diocese. It is hoped that this new entity will experience no interruption in its services and programs.

The name change does not go far enough. They are no longer Catholic or Christian and are simply secular. Though I guess there only actual concern was the retain the “C” of CSS. So maybe ‘Culture’ Social Services since they are tied only to the culture and not anything else. Really Judas Social Services would be a more apt descriptor. The only positive part of this is that they are not leaving the word Catholic in their organizations title as other organizations fraudulently do.

“This solution is what is best for the children by providing for their continuity of care and allowing for the retention of the caring, dedicated and professional staff employed by the agency,” said Gary Huelsmann, the agency’s executive director.

Just another item in the history of bad ideas that start with “we are doing it for the children.” Sadly it is always the child that loses with such help.

As then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons”

As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.

The following is from an article titled “Hold the applause: Save the praise for God alone”

All of this reminds me of an old Chevy Chase routine when he was a regular on Saturday Night Live. He would come on stage and say, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” always garnering a big laugh. No one was ever sure why, but it seemed to touch a nerve about the comedian’s feigned oversized ego and his disdain for everyone else. The joke, in other words, was on him.

There are many other things that parishes do that drive home the point that some among us are Chevy Chase, and most are not:

1. Applause for a job well done. Apparently the choir members in our parish are so insecure that they have to be thanked and applauded at least once a month. And here I thought they were singing to give glory to God and because they like to sing.

During a Stations of the Cross at our parish school last year, the priest led a round of applause for the good job the children had done. I know our children deserve to have their self-esteem built up, but is it really necessary—or even appropriate—when we have just finished recalling Christ’s passion and death?

2. Mentions in the parish bulletin. My parish used to list everyone on the staff but the flower arranger on the front page of our bulletin. The new pastor (the one who led us in “Happy Birthday” on Christmas Eve) has thankfully eliminated that list most weeks, under the theory that most of us already know who is on the staff.

3. Prayers of the faithful. Yes, I think we should pray for the pope, the bishop, and the pastor by name, and all the other ministers of the church. But do we have to do it every week, and do they always have to be first? How about a prayer for “Jane Jones, who is fighting to keep her business afloat and to continue to employ seven people,” or “Mark Johnson, who is balancing his job and visiting his aging mother in the nursing home every day”?

4. Announcements. I once went to an Episcopal church in New York City where they made all the announcements before their Mass began. When I mention this possibility to Catholic priests, their universal reaction is a jocular “But people aren’t there yet!”

The implication is that the announcements are so important that they must be done right before the dismissal, so that it is the sending forth on our mission to the world that becomes the afterthought, not the precious announcements about what is going on at the parish that week.

(Here’s the way to know if an announcement is really important at my parish: The homilist mentions it, it leads off the announcements, and then the priest mentions it again before the dismissal. Mostly these have to do with an event at the parish that they really, really want us to attend, such as the special concert by the contemporary choir or the St. Patrick’s Day dinner.)

5. The annual blessing of parish ministers. If there is ever a time when Chevy Chase would feel comfortable at our parish, it is the annual Sunday when we all thank and bless every single person involved in any sort of ministry in our parish.

We (about half of those present) are all called up on stage—I mean around the altar—and the priest reads a special prayer over us. Then all those in the stands—I mean the pews—raise their right hands and bless us, reminding themselves in so doing that we are Chevy Chase and they are not.

All of this reflects both a poor understanding of the church and of evangelization.

It is a poor understanding of the church because it says that “the church” is really the people who work for it, either on the staff or in a church-sponsored “ministry.” The rest become onlookers and cheerleaders and donors and “the faithful,” and it is their job to make sure that we—the ones who actually the ones who actually run the church—feel sufficiently loved and honored.

So was this article published in The National Catholic Register or The Wanderer? Perhaps Crisis Magazine? Surprisingly it was actually published in U.S. Catholic.

I think this is the first time I have ever found an article from that source that was actually worthwhile. The full article is really quite good and makes some good points. I have complained before about what I call the “Liturgy of the Bulletin” and applause at Mass is becoming more and more prevalent. I’m thankful though not to have run into Happy Birthday at Mass, knock on liturgical wood.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger said in his book “The Spirit of the Liturgy”:

“Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment.”

I couldn’t agree more.

We are all part of the Body of the Christ and have our roles to play. In the Holy Liturgy those in the pews praying and worshiping God are just as active, if not more so, than members of the choir or others involved in the Mass. There person who prays daily for the parish gets no applause, and should not. If you require such recognition than you need to refocus on what the Mass is about.

Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” (Lk 17:9–10)

Here is a timely rerun of a post from a couple of years ago.

In the last several years there has been a large increase in Zombie fiction, movies, and references to Zombies in the culture. The excellent World War Z, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the opening of Zombieland this weekend, and the hilarious “Sean of the Dead” are just some of the examples of Zombies used in modern culture. Discussions have popped up all over the place on how to survive a Zombie apocalypse. Of course this topic is all in jest, but I think it distracts from the real Zombies living among us.

Zombies are undead, but they are animated going through the motions of the living. They survive as a mockery of what they once were and only imitate a truly living thing.

But Zombies already walk and talk among us. There are plenty of dissident Catholics and dissident religious orders that are nothing but Zombie Catholics. The Zombie religious orders have no postulants and an aging community. These orders are truly dead since they don’t grow and are full of providing dead theology and the corpse of aging heresies. Yet at the same time appear to be living animated things fooling some into believing that there words have life. The truth will set you free which is why Zombie Catholics will concentrate on one truth while ignoring others leaving them trapped in the world of the undead.

Outside of religious communities there are also plenty of Zombie professors in Catholic institutions. Now it would be nice if these Zombies would physically rot so that you could see the source of the corruption they teach. Unfortunately these undead often look just like everybody else. Though Zombie priests and religious sometimes can be identified because they will wear anything but a Roman collar or a habit. They can often be identified because they teach from the “Culture of the Undead.” Zombie Catholics might seem quite comical, but don’t ever forget that they are quite dangerous to those they convince. They teach of death in two ways – physical and spiritual . You can hear them promoting abortion or relativizing it. Creating reasons for why it alright to withdraw medical treatment from someone who is not dying. Justifying sacrificing embryos on the altar of science. When it comes to spiritual death the Zombie Catholics proclaim how a sin is not a sin and in fact something to be actively accepted. Whether it is the advocacy of homosexual acts, contraception, or any other normalization of sin; it is all a part of the Culture of the Undead.

The undead like to make other things dead to. Now Catholic Zombies don’t go limping around mumbling “Brains, Brains.” No they usually walking around saying “My brains, My brains.” One way to identify Zombie Catholics is that they call themselves “thinking Catholics” and constantly call attention to how much smarter they are than other Catholics. They love to minimize and mock the devotional practices of other Catholics and will ransack school rooms and sanctuaries to remove statues, paintings, and other signs of the devotional life. They are also love to talk against the hierarchical church even sometimes when they are apart of it.

The idea of Zombie Catholics might not seem to be very scary. But if you have ever attended a Mass influenced by the undead I say be afraid, be very afraid. Zombie Catholics being of the undead like to liven things up to give the appearance of life and most of all to be relevant.

So how do we rid ourselves of the plague of Catholic Zombies? Well we can’t just go around shooting them in the head as in pop culture Zombies. There is some folklore that they are afraid of crucifixes like Vampires since they go to so much effort to remove Crucifixes wherever they go. The only real way to get rid of Zombie Catholics is prayer and fasting and of course personally living a life of holiness. Though we must remember the Zombie Catholics will always be among us to some extent. There will always be Zombie Catholics among the Wheat. We just need to make sure they are not taken seriously so that the damage they can cause is minimized.

Just remember that you don’t turn into a Zombie Catholic because you are bitten by another Zombie Catholic. No the infection spreads when people are bitten by ideas spread through the culture. The popular fads can seem new and exciting when you don’t see the pearl of great price in your own backyard. So the best way to inoculate yourself from Zombie Catholicism is to know your faith, scripture study, prayer, fasting, the devotional life, and obedience.

A faction of Occupy Vancouver protesters stopped short of a planned disruption of mass at the Holy Rosary Cathedral in downtown Vancouver on Sunday morning due to a police presence outside of the church.

But the offshoot group of the anti-corporate protest — calling themselves the “Occupy the Vatican” movement — later decided they will march on the cathedral Sunday afternoon.

Protester Bluesky Wolfman, speaking in lieu of march organizer Kevin Annett, said the motion to bring attention to thousands of residential school survivors was postponed due to a “heavy police presence” at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the cathedral.

“We see history one way and everyone sees it another way and we need to come together to talk,” Wolfman said Sunday.

“We need to start discussing the hardest parts of our history together and that way we can move forward as brothers and sisters,” he said, with a group of a few dozen largely First Nations members looking on.

Other Occupy protesters are saying Sunday’s “Occupy the Vatican” movement did not gain consensus at Saturday night’s general assembly and is thus not being supported by the majority.

“Today’s march is not approved by the general assembly,” said Yann Savard. [Source]

How about having the proposed action totally condemned. The “not approved” statement is the cowardly PR statement for a proposed attack on freedom to worship.

As for “Occupy the Vatican”, maybe they need a geography lesson.

They are not the only ones who want to draft an occupy movement such as a writer at America Magazine. The non-ordained as seen as the 99%. He of course does not mention what would be the laundry list of demands, but you can guess the typical – women’s ordination, acceptance of homosexual acts, and something akin to sexual license. It would almost be funny to watch them try to occupy St. Peter’s Square. The Church is not only protected from the gates of hell, but even misguided people with protest signs, hey hey ho ho chants, and tents.

I was also critical of attempts at at Catholic Tea Party movement. The Church is always in need of reform, a reform that starts with ourselves. Pray and fasting are the bedrock tools of true reform not orchestrated movements with signs. Certainly at times protests are prudent, but they have to be grounded in the spiritual life.

Here is a subject I want to explore that I wish I could be more intelligent and eloquent about. Though being a blogger this consideration never stopped me before.

I wonder what connection there is, if any, between the increased loss of faith and the increased interest in horror movies?

As for myself I have been a long time fan of horror movies and the types of films that appear on the B-Movie Catechism.  Growing up my father, brother, and I wold go to the drive-in for double and sometimes triple doses of horror movies.  Which meant a lot of Hammer films.  Throughout life I have always had a fascination with this genre. I would often stay up late at night when I could to watch those classic horror films along with all the schlock. When my father became one of the hosts of Sinister Cinema, a local TV show in Portland, Or that showed 2 horror films on Saturday, I was delighted to do some research for the movies to play that week.

The question I am pondering is to what extent my atheism led to my love of these movies?  In a horror movie you get to go beyond materialism into a world full of the supernatural.  There are spirits and things that go bump in the night.  Things come back from the dead.  In horror movies the atheist gets to pretend that he realizes:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

In horror films there is some echo despite how warped and faint it might be of the resurrection of our bodies. A purely materialistic horror film would be rather boring. The insane killer gets shots and that’s the end of the movie. Any supernatural events just get diagnosed in some psychological fashion. The haunted house is just a problem of old pipes. Something goes bump in the night and you call a plumber.

We instinctively know that there is something more than materialism and horror movies give us some sense of the preternatural. When our philosophy denies such we look for it in other avenues. Or at least that is my guess.

What say you?

People are being rather tough on Richard Dawkins over his latest statement.

“I wrote [an] article called ‘Atheists for Jesus,’ I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: ‘Atheists for Jesus.’ Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

When you have a restricted viewpoint allowing no possibility of God than you are limited to only having certain opinions that flow from it. Plus all of us have some degree of belief in what we accept and think our apprehension of truth to be truth. So an atheist saying someone, even Jesus, would come to the same conclusion they had is to be expected. The problem is not with what Dawkins said, but with his underlying philosophy. The joke goes as a philosopher Dawkins is a good biologist.

When I first heard Dawkins’ statement I thought of C.S. Lewis’s famous alliteration that Jesus is either Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Update: Actually the source is Josh McDowell and as Steve Greydanus pointed out “The traditional formulation is a dilemma, not a trilemma. (either God or bad man)”

Creative Minority Report thinking along the same lines quotes in full the relevant passage from C.S. Lewis.

Now from the famous alliteration Dawkins is limited to two options. So if he says Jesus would be an atheist that means he would either be a lying atheist or a lunatic atheist.

This type of nonsense also reminds me of the meme liberal theology explored where Jesus did not know he was God. By their perspective I guess they would also allow Jesus to be a fleeting agnostic or atheist. Pretty bad when you don’t believe in yourself or are not convinced of the evidence relating to yourself. Liberal theology gives us an amnesiac Jesus more fitting for a soap opera plot. In Jesus’s case finding yourself and finding God are the same thing. I would recommend Fr. Most’s “The Consciousness of Christ” for a thorough-going refutation of this idea and the magisterial teachings that totally contradict it.

Creative Minority Report links to a story about Cardinal Joseph Zen being on a hunger strike to defend the right to freedom of education.

The use of the words hunger strike rang alarm bells for me and I thought surely there is some miscommunication about this.

It comes as a response to the decision by the Supreme Court of Hong Kong to introduce a government committee in the management of a school. Now in addition to parents and students, government officials will have a say on the school governance.

With this hunger strike, the cardinal denounces what he calls “the danger of destroying Catholic education in the territory.”

The protest will last at least three days, during which the 79 year old cardinal will take only water and communion.

So he is not really going on a hunger strike he is fasting for three days. Words matter and describing this as a hunger strike is totally wrong. An actual hunger strike would be a form of suicide and would be expressly forbidden.

In fact a couple of years back a bishop went on an actual hunger strike and the Vatican intervened.

The Holy See, through the Apostolic Nuncio in Brazil, has asked Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio of the Diocese of Barra to end “as soon as possible” the hunger strike he has been carrying out for 18 days.